Be not color-blind

At any science fiction or fantasy (SF/F) convention that includes a panel on "the other" -- people who are visibly or in any other way different from the stereotypical white-male majority -- you'll probably find me in the audience. Apart from professional interest as an SF/F writer and communicator, thus someone who needs practice in learning to understand things that lie outside my own skull, it also feeds to one of my passions: understanding how other cultures and other people think and how they experience their world. Alexander Pope, probably my favorite forgotten wisemen (and sometimes wise-guy too), phrased it well: "The proper study of mankind is man." (And woman, of course. But he was writing 300 years ago, when women didn't exist yet.)

At one of those panel sessions, I learned an important lesson from a participant: we should not aspire to being "color blind", because in so doing, we blind ourselves to the different contexts that people from different ethnic, cultural, or other backgrounds live within, particularly school and in the workplace. (It was probably Mikki Kendal, who's always worth a listen even if she wasn't the source of this particular advice.)

This plays to one of my personal prejudices (you should pardon the word choice): that you can't really understand someone if you don't know where they're coming from. And people with visible differences (skin color, biological sex*, hair, eyes, height, handicap**, etc.) and invisible differences (religion, education, class, philosophy, psychological gender***, etc.) come from very different places than we do. It's a specific example of the more general principle that everyone you meet was definitely shaped by different experiences than yours and probably has multiple unique attributes, or combinations thereof, that you'd never suspect, even if that person superficially appears to be your twin.

* Which is far more complicated than I was taught in high school lo! these many years ago.
** I refuse to use the term "disabled", because most of these people are very able indeed. They are "handicapped" because they have more difficulty with some things than "abled" people do. That's not just personal verbal prejudice; it's an opinion I first learned from some very able people, including Fabien Vais, whose loss I continue to mourn.
*** Also vewy, vewy complex.

This is clearly important from an ethical perspective, but it's not just a theoretical or philosophical abstract: it also has hugely practical consequences. The October 2014 issue of Scientific American provides compelling evidence of this. Not only does embracing and welcoming diversity ease the burden on those who formerly never felt that they fit into the school/work/national/whatever culture; it also greatly improves the flow of ideas, leading to more interesting and creative dialogues and solutions to problems.

I currently own a prized "I don't understand/I still don't understand" t-shirt from the BBC Sherlock TV show. Among other things, it's a useful reminder that I'm not nearly as smart as I like to think I am. At some point, I hope to supplement it with one that runs along the following lines: "White male privilege: I'm soaking in it". (Explanations of both quips available on request.) But the take-away message is that we should not be color-blind, even if those colors are invisible to us unless we make a conscious effort to develop the intellectual (as in the case of "otherness") or technological (as in the case of infrared and ultraviolet light) tools for seeing things formerly unseen.