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MY TURN
In a progressive and liberal city like Portland, sometimes it is perceived as bad form to point out race and racial difference. Pointing these things out seems divisive and possibly racist as it seems counter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous line about judging people not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
King's powerful vision of racial justice is often reduced to the shorthand equivalent of being colorblind, as if being colorblind is both the means to equality and the result of having achieved it. What is missing in this reduction of his "I Have A Dream Speech," however, is his central message of freedom from state-sanctioned segregation and racial violence.
As recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland - to name only a few - make evident, the idea that we live in a post-racial colorblind society is clearly fiction. Asserting colorblindness as the path to racial and social justice only reproduces the very kinds of marginalization and oppression that animated the civil-rights movement in the first place. As it operates now, "colorblindness" is not about overcoming racial inequality so much as it is blinding us to the realities of how color shapes our lives and determines whose lives matter and whose do not.
The problem with our understanding of racism, according to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in his book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, is that we understand it...