She LITERALLY didn’t see color
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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It’s only white Americans that ask this dumbass question 😩
How hard is it to get? If it didn’t affect me personally, it couldn’t have been that big of an issue. /s
Hi, white person here with parents who grew up in the 70s and 80s. My parents *absolutely* “saw color” when they were growing up, and they saw it as a negative. The amount of racist language I was exposed to growing up, coming from their mouths, is nauseating to think about. They were so casual about it, and when I was educated enough to start standing up to them and calling them out on their shit, they literally would use desegregation as an excuse for their racism bc they blamed their poor education on being redistricted to go to more poorly-funded schools.
I’ve pushed them and pushed them for years to get them to unlearn this rhetoric, and they have largely made progress but their implicit bias is still in there under the surface and sometimes they (mostly my dad) will say something that makes me seethe and leave. Christmas Eve 2021 my husband and I literally left mid-dinner because my dad made a flippant racist remark and I was like, yeah you don’t get any more of my time and energy today and this is why. FAFO.
Whenever someone says something like this, the important thing to understand is that:
IT WAS BY DESIGN.
I grew up very close to Spokane. There was 1 half black girl in my entire high school. Everyone used to say things like, “We’re not racist, we just don’t have a lot of black people.” Come to find out that we didn’t have black people because all the neighborhoods were redlined and black people weren’t allowed to buy homes. Even when they were legally allowed to buy homes it was still made clear that they were not welcome here. Just because a person of color CAN buy a home, doesn’t mean a racist white person is going to sell them their home.
You know what happened a few years after I graduated HS? My school made national news because another school who came to play us in basketball DID have black people. Our student cheering section was yelling racial slurs at the opposing team. Our athletic director was standing right next to the student cheering section. He didn’t do a thing about it. The refs didn’t do a thing about it.
TL;DR Everyone was racist. They just didn’t do racist stuff because there weren’t people of that race to do racist stuff to. Once people of that race came around, they did racist stuff.
Oh, one more thing. My half black friend in HS? She told me after we graduated that she got called the N-word a few times in elementary school by our classmates. She punched a kid for calling her the N-word and got sent to the principal’s office. The principal threatened to suspend her, so she never stood up for herself again.
A TV history class of mine talked about this actually. You have baby boomers growing up in segregated neighborhoods, and then watching TV ONLY about white people in Leave it to Beaver. So they get this idea of the white picket fence white America in their heads.
So, when people campaign for integration, civil rights, and other rights as time goes on, they see it as going against the natural order.
Especially when, according to the African American history classes I took, their parents did everything they could to sabotage bussing, increase gentrification, worsen white flight, and KEEP those areas segregated. We are de facto almost as segregated today as we were in the 50s.
I grew up in an extremely white rural area like I was one of maybe 5 black people in the area. The only racism I ever experienced was as a young kid like kindergarten-1st grade. Kids are ruthless.
I was very enlightened when I watched The Wizard of Oz. For most of the first half I didn’t see color.
So fucking tired of the “I didn’t know about a thing as a child, and therefor it didn’t exist” argument.
Another Karen who’s totally disconnected from reality.
My whiter-than-Casper ass grew up in Baltimore in the 70s and 80s and you bet your ass I saw color. Some of the racist shit I heard from old white Baltimoreans was appalling, like when we were moving out of state and the mean ol’ bastard that lived next door to us pulled my Mom aside and asked her to make sure she sold the house to a white Christian.
I told her, “Mom, you should find a black lesbian couple to sell the house to. Mr. C will stroke out.” Mom thought that was an excellent idea but it didn’t pan out.
This was in 1988, for the record.
Is this some middle America shit because I grew up in the South and we had literally every type of person down there.
“the black population was less than 1% black”
Wow even the black people weren’t black.
Or maybe she’s just colorblind
EVERY damn time my city comes up it’s something racist. Rachel Doelazal, a broad day shooting, a black family getting chased by a biker gang, this atrocity… ITS NOT USUALLY THIS BAD OUT HERE I SWEAR
I can confirm this, I grew up and Spokane and still live here. The first thought when I got off the terminal in Chicago for vacation was “Wow that’s a lot of black people”. Not in like a racist way, I was a kid and was genuinely surprised. The high school I went to had like maybe 5 black kids in the entire school, and 1 black teacher.
(I do see color, I see the racist systemic injustices America has, I swear I’m not racist)
I grew up in Spokane since the late 70’s. The only segregated neighborhoods are the rich from everyone else.
I bought a brand new BMW from Spokane last year. That’s the first time I would 100% confirm that I have experienced racism in my life. The most condescending people I’ve ever dealt with in my life. The funny part is that it was all done on the phone. They just saw my last name and heard my accent and immediately turned into assholes.
My friend was a bartender in Spokane back in the early 00s. He worked at a night club. The night club banned the drink called “The Incredible Hulk” because black customers always ordered it. Once they stopped serving it, their black clientele went down to nearly zero. All according to the owner’s plan.
She’s not wrong though? I personally didn’t see color in the 70s and 80s. It only started in the 90s, when I was born.
Had a similar upbringing en la frontera in Texas, I don’t think I saw a single black person until Hurricane Katrina when a bunch of folks got displaced from Louisiana.
Even now if you say you don’t see color you’re lying
3.2m karma in 1 year? Nothing sus about that
how was the black population less than 1% black?
If somebody said “no one saw color”, they probably meant “I didn’t see anybody that isn’t white”
I lived in Spokane in the 70s-00s. Racism against blacks and Hispanics and Asians was rampant, even in the native community (Spokane has many reservations nearby and a large native population, which clearly self-identity as non-white).
I did my BA studies there, one of my 400-level classes asked me to do analysis on the local population, and iirc, around 1999 or so the greater area was 3% black. So yeah…she literally did not see color. I bet she heard the n word a lot though.
My favorite was from comedian Josh Johnson, a black man, that went to a white church once IIRC and one of the people there said, “We’re so happy to have you! Just so you know, I don’t see color.”
Josh responded with, “Okay? Why are you telling me?”
Ah, the people of my hometown bringing their best.
The black population was less than 1% black?
I went to high school in Spokane from 80 to 83. There might’ve been five black kids in the whole school, which was hugely shocking to me, since we had moved from Long Beach, California.
Nobody saw colour. Because they put the colour out of sight.
Seriously you guys, I would watch Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley and Star Wars and I literally never saw color!
I grew up, in part, in a small town in Ohio. There’s a podcast I listen to that covers events in small towns and they go over the demographics of the area prior to going into their stories.
They had an episode on a town near mine I was familiar with, so I was interested in hearing the demographic and background information. Our county was/is 98% white. The other 2% is the one latino family that owns the only Mexican restaurant in a 20 mile radius and the one asian family that owns the Chinese restaurant.
There are plenty of places in America were they simply do not have diversity. Non-white people just … don’t live there, and the people that live there never leave for other places except for rare ‘special’ occasions. I don’t think I ever encountered a non-white person in my life until I was 12 or 13 and moved to Atlanta.
A lot of people from back in Ohio will have these same kinds of hot takes and, like, yeah, you don’t see color because there’s literally no non-white people within an hour drive of you.
“The Black population was less than 1% Black until 1990”, what were they in 1989, fucking orange?
This statement always reminds me of Laura Ingraham when she said something about the demographics of the country changing “in ways nobody wants or asked for” but she has adopted children of color. Demographic differences are only ok when it’s her family.
This woman is deluded. People in the seventies absolutely saw color. It was obvious in music, movies, TV shows. As someone who was there I remember it clearly. I lived in Detroit.
Trump supporters make it so easy to identify them.
If you didn’t see the issues with race that existed in the 70s or 80s then you had your fucking eyes closed Mila.