In a move to appease “several students,” Brown University Department of Public Safety (DPS) no longer includes race/ethnicity in the descriptor of crime suspects. They join the University of Minnesota and the University of Maryland (and perhaps others) in this disturbing trend. All universities have said that vague descriptions reinforce stereotypes and foster hostility towards some members of the community.
Vague descriptions? Reinforced stereotypes? Huh?
The best analogy I can use to describe this approach is, “It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
I can list at least 10 reasons why this approach is so wrong, but I’ll boil it down to these three: colorblindness, political correctness, and misidentification of the issue.
1) Not using race/ethnicity as a descriptor gives the idea that colorblindness is something to which we should aspire.
Why is this an issue? Because we are not colorblind! To say that we don’t see color is the biggest piece of politically correct baloney that ever existed. There are differences in skin color, and people are treated differently because of it. If you say you don’t see it or that it doesn’t matter, you’re sticking your head in the ground and perpetuating the problem. Our brains work to capture and categorize all of the information in our interactions. A person’s color is just one piece that gets captured. We may say we don’t see a person’s color, but our brains do. And, when we ignore that, we essentially take away a part of a person’s identity. Also, “colorblindness” is a privilege primarily afforded to Whites. It’s something we can hide behind to avoid having conversations that make us feel uncomfortable.
We need to see color in order to understand each other, our perspectives, and our experiences. We don’t get past issues of race and inequity by not talking about race and inequity.
2) It’s political correctness run amok.
We’re all tired of political correctness, and an approach like the one taken at these universities does nothing to help that fatigue. PC teaches that we’re all the same, when we’re not. It teaches that to get along, we have to tolerate each other. It teaches that we have to choose our words carefully, for fear of saying the wrong thing and insulting someone. PC squashes any chance of conversations about real topics, because we’re too busy worrying about offending or being offended.
Not using race/ethnicity as a descriptor is a politically correct overreaction, which only serves to exacerbate the issues around PC.
3) Removing race/ethnicity is a misguided exercises that treats the symptom and not the cause of what’s really happening, which is bias and racial profiling.
Ask me to describe any person. In that description, I would include any identifiable features I can see. Color of skin. Gender. Hair color and length. Body build. Approximate height. Tattoos. All of that is description. That’s all it is.
The problem isn’t the description. The problem comes in when police use the description to (consciously or unconsciously) stop every Black male in a hoodie that they see. It’s when one part of a description becomes more important than all others. It’s also, frankly, because we, regardless of our own race, don’t have enough experience with people from other races to see differences other than the color of their skin.
If we remove this descriptor, what’s next? Maybe we stop using body build because we’re afraid of offending someone who’s heavy or thin or tall or short. And then we don’t use hair, because people who don’t have hair might be upset. And then we get rid of gender because, assuming a binary world, can we always tell who’s male and who’s female?. After all of that, we’re down to, “We have a suspect.” How helpful is that? I know, this is getting ridiculous, but honestly, where does it stop?
By removing race/ethnicity as a descriptor, these universities squash any discussion of the very real issues of bias and racial profiling. We don’t need to remove descriptors. We need to teach people that bias and racial profiling are real, and how to mitigate them.
The issue isn’t the descriptor. A description does not perpetuate stereotypes. The issue is in how the descriptor is being interpreted.
If universities really are institutions of higher learning, then they should be educating people about bias and racial profiling, not covering them up. However, before educating others, they’ve got some learning to do around colorblindness and political correctness. Without understanding the real issues, nothing will be resolved.
