Black Men Teach

My mother-in-law’s Christmas present from my daughter and son-in-law was a donation to Black Men Teach, a Minnesota organization. The name and purpose of Black Men Teach cut to the heart of the diversity and equality arguments that divide American liberals and conservatives.

The mission of Black Men Teach is “to recruit, prepare, place and retain Black male teachers in elementary schools.” Conservatives believe that such an organization should not exist. They claim that right-thinking people are color-blind and gender-blind. The attempt to specifically recruit Black men as teachers is thus typical of the discriminatory inclinations of liberals, who pervert education with political messages that themselves are racist and sexist. That viewpoint animates Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ views on affirmative action.

 Conservatives are right – they are blind to the facts of color and gender, although those facts stare us in the face every day. They are not unable, but unwilling to see the meaning of hiring Black male teachers in today’s America.

In a long career as a small-college historian, I participated in several hirings of Black men and women to all-white departments. Color had enormous significance. Experiences in life and school, approaches to and emotions about American history, and classroom encounters with mostly white students were very different in ways difficult for whites to fully understand.

“Color blindness” is claimed as a virtue by conservative white people. Black Americans don’t believe it. More than any other ethnicity, Blacks vote for Democrats, an estimated 87% in the presidential election of 2020.

Exit polls in November showed that 86% of Blacks voted for Democrats. Even a Black Republican candidate can’t attract Black votes: a survey showed that Raphael Warnock won 90% of Black votes in Georgia in November against Herschel Walker.

Black Lives Matter is a banal truism. But when white American society was daily confronted with public protest against the fact that in America black lives mattered less, conservatives attacked the BLM truism as itself objectionable. New slogans were devised to counteract the idea that political change might make Black lives matter more. The ubiquitous evidence that Black lives are more at risk is dismissed, because conservative social policy is not evidence-based, but ideologically comfortable. Seeing color is frightening to Republican voters, so is anathema to Republican politicians.

Color blindness comes in many forms. It is mostly inherited, and is much more common among males. The Ishihara color test can diagnose the type and severity, and accommodations can be made. There is no cure.

Conservative color blindness has no biological source – it is an ideological affliction. It does not conform well or adapt to the actual colors of our social context. Its defense mechanism is cleverly chosen. Conservatives argue that any attempt to think about the differences color makes is “racist”. They claim to stand fully behind the modern emphasis on equality across ethnicity and gender, despite their history, and so are better than “phony liberals”. Color blindness is the real non-discrimination.

All forms of color blindness represent inability to discriminate when the differences are obvious. What would happen if the conservative form of color blindness were tested? How much do conservatives actually notice color? What feelings arise from seeing color?

Here’s what I hypothesize those tests would show: most cases of so-called conservative color blindness are false positives. They don’t want to admit what they see, feel, and do, so they claim that what we see doesn’t exist. Those who are offended by Black Men Teach, and every other social action which recognizes and reduces color differences, willfully stagger through our daily realm, bumping into people and things of value, which they say they can’t see.

Conservative color blindness is an occupational affliction, debilitating especially to public personalities. Claims to be suffering from this disability come mainly from people who need to justify their behavior to some public. Their symptoms usually include the loud assertion “I Am Not A Racist.” A classic example of how attention to color can coexist with claims of color blindness came from Trump himself in his final debate against Biden in 2020. Conservatives had found the most outrageous thing anyone connected with BLM had ever said, and repeated it incessantly. This allowed Trump to say both that BLM is “a horrible thing” and “I am the least racist person in this room.”

I wish Black Men Teach success in helping to staff Twin Cities schools “with racially and culturally diverse teachers and leaders”. Elementary school students will see the Black teachers and learn more about the real meaning of color. At that age, they won’t have developed ideological diseases like conservative color blindness.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook, WI

December 31, 2022