How Race-Consciousness Can Affect Relationships
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What roles should “color-blindness” and race-consciousness play in personal interactions (as distinct from public policy)?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
In recent editions of this newsletter, I highlighted the TED Talk “A Case for Colorblindness,” by Coleman Hughes, as well as Hughes’s subsequent debate with the New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. After listening to them consider the proposition “Does color-blindness perpetuate racism?,” I noticed one way that their exchange could advance this often polarizing conversation.
When defining his terms, Bouie suggested—reasonably, I think—that color-blindness is “the idea that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our public policy and our private lives.” He quickly declared his own main concern to be public policy and focused on it for the rest of the debate. In a future edition of this newsletter, we will focus narrowly on public policy, and you’ll hear more about Bouie’s position, as well as the strongest counterarguments.
But today, our focus is on interpersonal “color-blindness.”
At one point, after Hughes reiterated his own belief that we should not racially discriminate or treat others with regard to race in the law or in our personal lives, Bouie responded with this distinction:
But the issue is not our personal interactions here. The
