The colorblind ideal

Howard Schultz isn’t as wrong as critics suggest

In 1939, when Malcolm X was in eighth grade, he told his English teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up. “One of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic,” the teacher replied. “Why don’t you plan on carpentry?”

Later, Malcolm would recall the incident as a turning point in his life. He was getting better grades than most of the children in the class, but his white teacher — and his white peers — could not see beyond his race. “I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be,” Malcolm wrote.

I’ve been thinking about this episode during the recent controversy surrounding former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who told an interviewer last week that he did not “see color.” The comment sparked widespread outrage on the airwaves against Mr. Schultz, whose possible independent run for the presidency was declared dead in the water.

There’s good reason for that. If you’re a minority in the United States, Mr. Schultz’s claim that he’s not seeing color sounds like he’s not seeing you. It’s a denial of your identity, of your distinctive culture and history.

Yet the collective shaming of Mr. Schultz reflected its own amnesia, ignoring the discrimination and hatred that race-consciousness has wrought. When a cop profiles a black kid — or a teacher denigrates the child’s intellect — he or she is definitely seeing color, and in all the wrong ways.

So how can we teach people a better way? The conventional answer is diversity training, which has become a multi-million-dollar business over the past few decades.

And as Mr. Schultz’s critics gleefully pointed out, Starbucks went fullin for diversity training after two black patrons were arrested — simply for being black — at one of its Philadelphia locations. The company closed all of its 8,000 stores for a halfday so employees could take its diversity course, which explicitly rejected Mr. Schultz’s color-blind stance.

“Growing up, this term called ‘color blind’ described a learning behavior of pretending not to notice race,” declared Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, in a training video that the company produced. “So today we are taking a new journey, talking about race directly.”

But what if it turned out that those discussions have the opposite effect of what they intend? A 2016 study found that companies with required diversity trainings hired fewer minorities and women, in part because managers felt threatened by the accusatory overtones of the trainings.

Other studies have shown that trainings can trigger “racial backlash” among rank-and-file employees, too, making them more hostile toward people who are different from them. Videos celebrating multiculturalism have been shown to increase viewers’ fears of immigrants. And people informed about a common racial or ethnic bias sometimes become more likely to exhibit it.

None of that means we should stop trying to improve the racial climate in our workplaces, where minorities continue to suffer routine harassment and discrimination. But it does suggest that we should be a bit more tempered in our claims about who sees race, and how to change the way they see it.

And we should also be a bit more tolerant toward Howard Schultz, whose comment echoed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dictum that we should judge each other on character rather than color. Let me be clear: Nobody who grows up in America — a country founded upon slavery and racism — can be truly color blind. But I still think it’s a noble if unattainable ideal, given all we know about the hatreds that color has spawned and how little we know about how to counteract them.

The people who built slavery and Jim Crow saw color. The people who exterminated Native Americans saw color. The people who barred Chinese immigrants saw color.

And the teacher who told Malcolm X he couldn’t be a lawyer? He saw color, too. In fact, he could see little else.

We must not and cannot deny the history of racism, which lives on in a million different ways. But we also should stop pretending that we’re so enlightened — and so very woke — that our way of seeing race is the only right one. We might wake up one day to find out that we were wrong.