Mgt 330 - Racial Color Blindness

Marcus Pizzetti

MGT 330 OL 1 09 – Fall 2015

Professor Alessia Contu

11/06/2015

Brief 2

Racial color blindness is “the belief that racial group membership should not be taken into account, or even noticed“, in other words, a term that is used when people ignore the racial characteristics when choosing a person to participate in some activity or receive some sort of service. For example, in Brazil where I grew up, we do not have racial color blindness when trying to get into college. Every college has a percentage of acceptance already reserved for people with color. I completely disagree with the way Brazil approaches this matter because it makes it seem that people with color are less capable then a person with white skin color.                Color blindness is problematic because we grow up noticing race. There is no way to pretend it does not exist. We think that color blindness could be beneficial but results from an experiment done with small children at a school had a shocking result. Some children were introduced to educational color blindness by reading stories. The children exposed to the color blind story were less likely to identify favoritism and instances of discrimination. As the professor at the Harvard Business School Michael I. Norton said, “It’s so appealing on the surface to think that the best way to approach race is to pretend that It doesn’t exist… But the research shows that it simply doesn’t work. We do notice race, and there’s no way of getting around this fact.” Research shows that attempting to ignore race can make things even worst rather than solving the problems of race in the workplace. According to the authors, color blindness is very problematic. All the experiments mentioned in the readings “backfired”. Every time someone tried to “practice” color blindness on those experiments, the people of color felt like they had something to hide. They also felt that they were more racist than the people that did not hesitate to mention the race.
        I think that most of the policies in the United States are “color blind”. Every policy is supposed to be equal, just and neutral for every race. That is just in theory. In practice it is still very biased. In theory every thing should be equal but it is still hard to get a black kid to go to a white school. I believe that some of our policies promote more racism by being color blind. We should be able to say “that asian kid”, “that black woman”, “that white man” when describing someone without being judged as racists.
        I grew up in the south of Brazil, where almost everybody is white because we were colonized by Germans and Italians. The older generation is very racist down there. The newer generation learned to welcome the black community by not being color blind. I don’t think color blindness is beneficial to a society. When you force to pretend that something is not there, it makes it awkward. However I do believe that the newer generation is moving away from racism and it is learning to embrace every culture. I think that we should put color blindness aside and learn to accept different cultures and colors.