Racism Is Colour Blind...

Adrian MacNair: How to combat racism on campus by banning 'weird' looks

Posted: February 09, 2010, 11:00 AM by Kelly McParland Filed under: Full Comment,Adrian MacNair

 

One of the most predictable effects of anti-racism policies can be found in the law of unintended consequences, in that after a while they tend to foster and perpetuate the very racism those policies aim to defeat. After all, cataloging and enumerating every shade of skin pigment in a University is more than just an exercise in demography. It preserves the contradictory premise of anti-racism theory, by arguing that race is important and needs to be identified, so that we may observe how far the targets of this alleged racism have come. Instead of applying simple, logical rules in workplaces and educational institutions, such as valuing individuality in concert with equality, and then admonishing those people who break those rules, there are too many people who classify discrimination into two distinct categories. The one category is the privileged white Christian heterosexual male who is assumed can never be a victim of any sort, and the other contains everybody else who happens to reside in the world. This makes it easy, since institutions can add all the white people together, all the non-white people together, and then subtract one from another to see if it is diverse enough.

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