There are by now several compelling arguments why being “color-blind” does not address the problem of racism but merely masks it. A recent study in Social Psychological and Personality Science, detailed in New York Magazine, found that children were self-censoring to avoid referring to people by race. Middle-school children were asked to identify a photo of a person out of a group of 40 by asking yes-or-no questions. It was discovered that:
Overall, the odds of children mentioning race were 4 times lower than mentioning gender […], despite the fact that both questions were equally useful for completing the task. It was also clear that children noticed race: Over 97% reported noticing that the photos varied by race in the posttask measures.
The results were consistent across different (self-reported) racial backgrounds. The children who avoided mentioning race despite noticing it explained their choice as not wanting to be rude or racist. The study concludes that the stigma on mentioning race hurts minority children as race is central to their identities.
While this is a powerful argument to stop avoiding race in conversation and pretending to live in a postracial society, one should be careful not to interpret the findings as an encouragement for referring to people by their (perceived) background — something the authors never explicitly state in the article. Whatever benefits a person may derive from a strong racial identity, that identification needs to be determined by the person themselves and not assigned to them by the external observer.