Colorblindness

In recent years I’ve heard the term colorblindness a lot. Sometimes even within my friend group.

I find it interesting because thinking back at my youth, back in Puerto Rico, we had similar concepts. In our case, the Dominican population is considered Black. Interestingly, people of darker skin tone that were born and raised in Puerto Rico were not considered Black, we would just ignore the fact that they had a darker skin tone.

Comparing that to the recent definitions of colorblindness, outside of the Puerto Rico cultural space, the US mainland population use it quite frequently for people of different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. For the most part, these minorities have different skin tones or complexions.The amount of times I’ve heard or been told that “they are colorblind when it comes to race” is too many to count. Unfortunately, no one is perfect and we’ve all, at some point or another, caused someone else with a different cultural or ethnic background to feel awkwardly, even if we did not mean to.

As humans with an overwhelming amount of cultures, countries, ethnicities, and all of the wonderful things that makes up the world’s diversity, we should not be trying to ignore color but rather embrace it and strive to understand what background that person has. I’ve been on both sides of the situation. I remember during high school, being asked if I spoke ‘Mexican’; makes sense since I was attending a predominantly White school in, then, rural Justin, TX. I had conversations where they assumed Puerto Rico was a country or place near or in Mexico. And if I had come here through the Texas border.