Summary

Have you heard a politician or a friend say, “I’m colorblind?” I am not colorblind, and I am not blind to gender, either. I am aware of color, gender, body type, accents, education, manners, wealth, personality type, and a lot more. And so are you. We all are. The question comes when we decide what to do with the observations that we all ma

For the next 10 minutes, we will discuss what these observations--and any actions that may stem from these observations--mean to us as individuals and as a society.

Transcript

Have you heard a politician or a friend say, “I’m colorblind?” I am not colorblind, and I am not blind to gender, either. I am aware of color, gender, body type, accents, education, manners, wealth, personality type, and a lot more. And so are you. We all are. The question comes when we decide what to do with the observations that we all make.

For the next 10 minutes, we will discuss what these observations--and any actions that may stem from these observations--mean to us as individuals and as a society.

Let’s start with an admission; I am partially red-green color blind. When I was being processed and tested prior to joining the Army--you know, the part where they do things like count the number of your arms and legs--the bored evaluator was flipping the pages of the test for color blindness. Pages like the one here started showing up.

There was--and is--no number that I could see. The guy next to me, also on the same page, called out a number. I repeated it. That went on for eight pages or so; I called out the numbers the guy next to me said, and I passed.

But let’s go back to the subject at hand. We all see the same things; we do not all take the same actions based on what we observe. And there are times that taking action on the observations we make about race, gender and sexual preference are absolutely right and correct. For example, if you are a woman with a preference for heterosexual males, lacking specific knowledge, you might use what used to be called “gaydar” to make at least an initial assessment of whether a particular male might be worth flirting with. In some professions, ballet for one, there are many more hetero females than straight males. One of the first, and legitimate, questions that women in ballet ask each other about attractive males is, “Is he gay or straight?”

Considering race, gender, body type, income and sexual preference are perfectly all right when it comes to dating and marriage. Are they acceptable considerations when it comes to friendship? Acceptable legally, yes, but one would be much the poorer if these considerations in any way limit the number or scope of friendships.

Many, if not most, colleges use race in their admission decisions. Assuming that the number of acceptances has a limit, isn’t it true that if an affirmative action admission process permits the acceptance of a minority who would otherwise not have made the cut, that a non-minority applicant who would have made the cut is not accepted? This is a zero sum game; for every winner, there must be a loser.

So far, we have talked about circumstances where it is either clearly permissible to use characteristics like race and gender in decision making and actions, as in considering these differences in dating, or at least arguably acceptable, as in college admissions. There are categories of actions where making decisions and acting on race and gender differences is unacceptable; wrong and, hopefully, illegal. Using race or gender to justify superiority is deeply wrong. Supporters of slavery used their twisted views on race to cast blacks as non-human, using that as the main argument to make slavery acceptable. In the same way, the Nazis positioned Jews as non-human to create a foundation for their horrific treatment of religious...