The statement “I don’t see race” is, in fact, one of the more racist things you can say. A difference exists between valuing each person’s life equally regardless of race and pretending that race does not matter, and it is intensely problematic that so many people conflate the two.

Since Darren Wilson’s acquittal following his shooting and killing Michael Brown, racial tensions have risen, and hashtags such as “#AllBlackLives” and “#BlackLivesMatter” became popular on social media. Another reactionary hashtag popped up following the success of the others: “#AllLivesMatter.”

While tags such as “#BlackLivesMatter” attempt to bring attention to issues at hand and emphasize the racial components of the matter, the response demonstrates the immediate frustration many white people experience when forced to examine racial relations as well as the tendency of countless people to ignore race rather bluntly as a factor in social problems. 

This instance serves as yet another indicator of how commonly many white people appropriate black issues to simultaneously support a cause at their own convenience and, frankly, make issues of racial inequality about themselves. 

The culture of the United States largely maintains white as the default, and that anything other than white is different in a bad, abnormal way. Many believe and insist that Mexican immigrants deserve less than white U.S. citizens solely on the basis of heritage, that a football team should be able to keep using a widely recognized racial slur as its name and that Asians are “all the same,” that race-specific police brutality has more to do with black Americans’ inherent criminal nature than deep-seated racism. And the list goes on. 

Though marginalized races are individual and respectively unique from one another, they still fall into the category of “Other,” and are subject regularly to assimilation (“whitification”) or complete dismissal. A person of color must renounce any stereotypically race-specific behavior if she wants to be taken seriously by a large portion of the population. Even those who “act white” according to societal expectations still face stigmatization due to the color of their skin. 

Recurrent tropes in entertainment are telling regarding general societal perspectives. For black people, we see the ignorant black gangster, the harmless buffoon and the token black best friend. The Asian community can claim the smart Asians who wish to honor their family and the foreigner whose accent is perceived as funny. The down-on-their-luck Mexican worker who must turn to his white friend for financial help makes all too many an appearance, as well.

These now-clichés wouldn’t be offensive as isolated incidents, but as they constitute what people genuinely come to accept about persons of color, they become casually harmful. 

It is unsettling that the people who initially established the concept of race and assigned levels of worth based upon these distinctions — white people — are so willing to ignore the malicious sentiments of the past, especially as they claim that it “does not matter.” Race does matter, whether we acknowledge it or not. To turn a blind eye to those who have had fundamentally different experiences than you is to trivialize the difficulties they have had to confront.

When good-natured white people go to protests sporting signs that read such things as, “I am Mike Brown,” or, “I can’t breathe,” they only add to the oversight of racial issues. These behaviors work as a hijacking of black voices in the activist sphere, which only serves as yet another misappropriation of black issues.

In the U.S., to say “I don’t see race” is roughly equivalent to recognizing only one race as valid. We might claim that producers cast Scarlett Johansson over an actual Japanese woman in the role of Motoko Kusanagi merely due to her acting capabilities. We might claim that the disapproving atmosphere concerning President Barack Obama at some Republican conferences only occurs due to disagreement with his decisions in office. We might claim that George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in an honest endeavor to protect his property. We might claim that Michael Brown was shot and killed simply because Darren Wilson was doing his job. We might venture to say that none of these instances have anything to do with our societal perception of race.

But we’d just be lying to ourselves.