The Colorblind Society

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Color blindness or also referred to as race blindness is the exclusion of race in the assessment of a human being. Color blindness is a new concept that strives to mineralize racial discrimination. Our society has strived to find a state of colorblindness but has yet to succeed. Past discriminations have hindered the progress of colorblindness in society. Due to racism in the past many hurdles were created for minorities to overcome in the present. Hurdles such as poverty and negative stereotypes. These hurdles in turn have made it hard for our society to truly become color blind. The racism from the past has made our society unable to truly practice colorblindness because it has caused individual, institutional, and systemic discrimination in the present.

Discrimination in the past came in many forms but it started with systemic discrimination. In the early 1900s the Anglo-Saxon ideology was at a high. In the segregation of Mexican student’s article, the author shows how these ideologies affected Mexican American in California. Even though Californian had equality law for Mexican Americans, they were still discriminated against. “Mexicans were only allowed to attend churches located in the Mexican zone. Paradoxically, the religious segregation of the Mexicans only served to sanction other forms of racial segregation and promoted an era of un-Christian Anglo-Saxon domination” . Mexican Americans were forced to live in certain areas and were forced to attend only certain churches. Caucasians systemically discriminated Mexican Americans by separating that entire group of people from themselves.

This systemic discrimination which existed in the past has continued to the present. This discrimination of separating and creating communities for different ethnic groups in the past has inadvertently caused discrimination now. The communities inhabited mostly by minorities became poorer neighborhoods because minorities didn’t earn as much as their white counterparts and so they could not invest much into their communities. Caucasian majority neighborhoods sustained their status and got a price boost when compared to the local minority neighborhood. This translates to present day because even though minorities aren’t forced to stay in certain areas anymore, they still stay in poorer neighborhoods because they cannot afford to move to a better one. “Segregation in housing allowed most white homeowners to accumulate equity and wealth while most minorities could not” . This present day segregation of housing is caused by white homeowners discriminating against minorities and their belief that minorities will cause trouble in their neighborhoods. They assume this because most minorities come from poorer neighborhood which they live in because it is affordable or their ancestors were forced to settle in. The past systemic discrimination makes it hard for colorblindness to progress in the present.

In the past America has had its share of institutional discrimination. But the most negatively influential of this type of discrimination is that of schooling. During the early 1900s Mexican American children were discriminated by Caucasians. Mexican American children were made to go to a separate school. “…school segregation of /Chicano students in public elementary and secondary schools in California has its origins in racial ideologies of Anglo-Saxon superiority…” . Caucasians justified this institutional discrimination by calming that Mexican American children were not well versed in English and this was a hindrance to Caucasian children. The school Mexican Americans children were sent to had a “dumbed” down curriculum so that in the future the Mexican American children would provide a cheap source of labor.

This type of institutional discrimination has a connection to the present. These children who were discriminated against had less skill and did not get good paying job and so they were stuck in their poor neighborhoods and...
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