The term color blind both fails to explain racism and maintain a deficit notion of people with disabilities instead use color-evasive

Often, when used in everyday discourse, disabilities are metaphors for weaknesses or limitations (Schalk 2013). Consider these examples: disabled cars on the highway, myopic views and emotionally handicapped, to name a few. Moreover, race scholars also use dis/ability as a metaphor for disadvantage: racism cripples, deaf to the argument on racial injustices, and shortsighted views on racial inequities. Yet, people with physical differences experience racism; deaf people can listen to arguments; and those who are nearsighted can still understand complex situations. These terms are inherently problematic, as they do not accurately depict the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while simultaneously maintaining a deficit notion of people with disabilities (Watts and Erevelles 2004). Color-evasiveness, as an expansive racial ideology, resists positioning people with disabilities as problematic as it does not partake in dis/ability as a metaphor for undesired.

Specifically, the racial ideology of denying the significance of race should not be equated with blindness because it is an inadequate descriptor. Color-blindness, as a racial ideology, conflates lack of eyesight with lack of knowing. Said differently, the inherent ableism in this term equates blindness with ignorance. However, inability to see is not ignorance; in fact, blindness provides unique ways of understanding the world to which sighted people have no access. Blind people are knowers. DisCrit encourages us to resist the urge to position blind people as deficit (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b). By identifying the ideology of race as irrelevant – as color-blindness – scholars critiquing race and racism are perpetuating what Gotanda (1991) was arguing against, non-recognition. ‘Nonrecognition fosters the systematic denial of racial subordination and the psychological repression of an individual’s recognition of that subordination, thereby allowing such subordination to continue’ (Gotanda 1991, 16). The ways ableist language perpetuates non-recognition allows for the subordination of dis/abled people and misses the intersections between being socially constructed racially as the other and dis/abled.

Moreover, when CRT and other scholars of race, racism, and white supremacy use dis/ability as a metaphor for lacking, it signifies a deep misunderstanding of how ability and dis/ability are socially constructed (May and Ferri 2005). The same people who recognize race as a social construction often overlook that dis/ability labeling is the result of similar (but not exactly the same) social processes, ignore the ways race and ability are socially constructed in tandem, and equate difference with deficit (Erevelles and Minear 2010). In this sense, by subscribing to the racial ideology of color-blindness, we are perpetuating a parallel trend that Gotanda (1991) originally critiqued – the idea that race is an immutable fact. In this case, assuming dis/ability is an immutable fact disguises the social processes that position children of color as less than making them more likely to be labeled with a dis/ability and ignores the ways society dis/ables many people (Kliewer, Biklen, and Kasa-Hendrickson, 2006).

The goal here is not to scold or to police the language of race scholars but to instead suggest that if we use an intersectional framework, we can all strengthen our critique of a racial ideology that rejects the recognition of race through confronting the (un)spoken norms lurking within concepts of race and racism. By naming this racial ideology as color-evasiveness, we demonstrate the social construction of race and ability while simultaneously confronting the social and material consequences of racism and ableism.

Additionally, informed by narrow understandings of blindness by sighted people, color-blindness implies passivity. Here, blindness is imagined as something one is struck with or victim to – something that happens to them. Yet, that ignores the power of white supremacy, and whiteness situated within it, to actively evade discussions on race. As Bonilla-Silva (2006) found, there are purposeful rhetorical moves employed to avoid the discourse of race, racism, and racial inequities and maintain white supremacy. One must, ‘repress, avoid, and conceal a great deal in order to maintain a stance of “not noticing” color’ (Frankenberg 1993, 33). This is not the passive characteristic that the term color-blind suggests; instead, this actively (re)inscribes racial stereotypes (Williams and Land 2006).

This sense of passivity is not benign. The implication of passivity and the use of blindness within the racial ideology of color-blindness locates the problem and the power within an individual; one can simply ignore race, and racism will go away (Gotanda 1991). In other words, the underlying argument for the racial ideology of color-blindness is that everyone will be treated fairly if race was discounted. In fact, as Leonardo (2007) noted, the racial ideology rewards those in power who ignore race,

Of course, it is possible that today’s color-blindness is a way of feigning color-consciousness, that is, color-blindness is really a misnomer in a color-obsessed nation. But to the color-blind society, they amount to the same thing because color-blind people do not recognize it as feigning but as a reality and more significantly, an accomplishment. (266)

Thus, those espousing a color-blind racial ideology are individually positioned as racially enlightened while simultaneously reproducing power and inequity in a system of white supremacy. It is the systemic violence of racism that impacts our daily lives, not just through individuals but also through institutions. The racial ideology of color-evasiveness allows for an understanding that this failure to address material conditions is not passive, but purposeful. As Gotanda (1991) argued, we must link the race of an individual with the social conditions in which they must survive. Color-blind racial ideology allows for a justification of inaction that propels the system of racial inequities forward. In other words, it is not that whites have trained themselves not to notice color. Instead, those in power often have ‘selective engagement with difference rather than no difference at all’ (Frankenberg 1993, 143). Though Frankenberg argued that along with color-evasion there also occurred a related power-evasion, we argue that those are one and the same. In the context of white supremacy, actively avoiding talking about race is a form of power.