Do we really want a colorblind society?

Last night after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech MSNBC host Chris Matthews said this of the President:


”I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.”


Despite the fact that Matthews is a staunch Obama supporter, it’s no surprise that the words “I forgot he was black” caused a ruckus, with many saying this quote implies that blackness is some deficiency Obama needs to overcome.


Regardless of your thoughts on Matthews, his comment and the world’s reaction to it bring up an important question that was tackled in a recently posted news article titled, “Do Blacks Truly Want to Transcend Race?“


I, for one, do not. As many of the people interviewed in the aforementioned analysis said, I don’t want people to pretend I’m not black. I want them to accept my race and not assume I’m incompetent because of it.


Blair L.M. Kelley, an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University agrees that it’s important to remember race.



”When you say we’re going to transcend race, are white people called on to transcend their whiteness?” she was quoted asking in the article. ”When (black people) transcend it, what do we become? Do we become white? Why would we have to stop being our race in order to solve a problem?”


This is a topic I wrote about when I penned a bi-weekly column for Velocity Weekly in Louisville, Ky. In that particular article my argument was that our country needs to embrace diversity, not ignore it. Pretending we’re all the same does not celebrate people of color. It erases us.