CHAPTER 9: PLEASE STOP SAYING,
“I DON’T SEE COLOR”

A:   At some point, either during our engagement or shortly after we were married, we had a long talk with Chad’s parents about our differences—not just mine and Chad’s, and not just about our skin color, but about my family and their family and the different ways we think, communicate, respond, and react to things. Chad’s dad—with his kind heart and with complete genuineness—said to me, “Adaeze, we don’t see you as any different. We see you as our daughter-in-law and part of the family.”

While the last half of that sentence was beautiful, I had to gently explain to him that the first part didn’t make me feel seen at all because it implied that all my experiences that have been totally different from his were being consciously or subconsciously pushed aside for the sake of some false sense of sameness and uniformity. The heart behind it was great, but it wasn’t an accurate reflection of the vast differences in our realities.

I told him, “I want to be accepted as part of the family and as your-all’s daughter-in-law with all of the differences we have, not in spite of them.”

C:   Not long ago, I had a conversation with a college student over coffee, and he told me about a time he was in a traveling church choir. He had an epiphany during one of the services. “I looked out and everybody just looked the same to me. I thought, This is how I should always see people around me. I shouldn’t be worried about what people look like.”

But the truth is my and Adaeze’s different skin colors do change how the world sees and interacts with us. When we claim not to see color, all we are doing is superimposing ourselves onto someone else. The reality we have to wrestle with is that people of different ethnicities have different experiences that we do not understand.

A:   The language of “I see everyone the same” or “I don’t see you as any different,” when we clearly are, may be well-intended. However, unless you acknowledge and accept my differences, you will never fully appreciate how or why my experiences are different from yours.

C:   And you will never get to know the full beauty of God’s creation, which is a multiethnic, multicultural, and deeply diverse conglomerate of experiences, backgrounds, and beliefs—all of which are unified under Christ. His awesome sovereign design is far beyond our understanding, yet the more we lean in and embrace one another’s differences, the more we see the depth and width and breadth of His love for His creation.

A:   Let’s face it: there is no “normal.” We are all different. We all grew up in different environments, with different lenses we use to see the world and with different ways of communicating and expressing ourselves. Take the conversation Chad and I had on our way back from a hiking trip a few years ago . . .

HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS?

C:   Midway through the summer of 2020, after we’d been dating almost a year, Adaeze and I drove to the mountains to go hiking. It was a beautiful day with bright blue skies—not too hot, not too cold. Butterflies were still swirling around us, both literally and figuratively. We had just started dating, so we were still acting all flirty and trying to put our best foot forward. It was great.

As we were driving home, we started talking about the recent murder of George Floyd. I was very much in the dark about how something like this might be hitting Adaeze, and even though I had no understanding of the communal pain the Black community was feeling at the time, I wanted to talk about how I could help her as she processed everything.

A:   The more we talked, the more my emotions began to rise, and my voice became more animated. I had a lot of pent-up emotion surrounding George’s murder, and when Chad asked me about it, the dam just broke open.

C:   This conversation didn’t go quite as I expected. Adaeze got emotional and broke down in tears, frustrated not so much by the conversation itself but by the harsh reality of the world she, as a woman of color, lived in.

I felt totally out of my depth and honestly had no clue what to do. So I put my hand on Adaeze’s leg and just kind of gripped it. Then, in an attempt to comfort her, I said something to the effect of, “You’re okay—we’re just talking about this.” That’s when Adaeze completely shut down.

A:   It felt like he was silencing me. It was one of the first times in our relationship that I wondered if my emotions and the things I had to go through as a Black woman would be too much for Chad.

I physically turned away from him—I thought subtly—and looked out the window, feeling like I needed to hide the tears that were sneaking down my face. I suddenly felt like I was “too much” for my white boyfriend.

C:   She wasn’t hiding her frustration very well. I paused for a beat or two, and then I cautiously asked, “Hey, what happened there? Why have you been looking out the window for the past few minutes?”

A:   “Because it felt like you were trying to silence me and shut me down.”

C:   “Oh, that was not my intention at all. I was just trying to let you know that it’s okay, and I’m here.”

A:   “Yes, but the way you did it made me feel like I was too much for you or like you needed to ‘calm me down,’ when I was just telling you how I feel.”

C:   “It just felt like you were starting to work yourself up. I was trying to bring you back here—to remind you that it’s just you and me talking about this right now.”

A:   “And I’m trying to tell you I’m not ‘getting myself worked up.’ What we’re discussing is very upsetting. And even though it’s just me and you talking right now, this is still my very real reality, and it can be painful. When I talk about it, I’m going to feel that pain.”

C:   “That’s totally fair. I just didn’t realize this conversation was going to stir up this kind of emotion for you. If you’d rather not talk about it right now, we don’t have to.”

A:   “Well, I wanted to, but then you shut me down. And, babe, you’re not always going to be able to anticipate what my reaction will be, because we don’t live in the same reality. If you really want to help me feel more comfortable talking to you about it, please just let me feel it, and sit in it with me.”

C:   What Adaeze was saying made complete sense to me. I just wasn’t used to that level of emotion during conversations. It’s not the way my family communicated when I was growing up. I’m used to the classic dad who doesn’t want to cry, so he’ll stop talking for a while until he’s more composed, even if it takes him like twenty freaking minutes to get through two sentences.

A:   Whereas in my family, we talked most things out. Suppressing emotion wasn’t really a thing I learned how to do—with one exception. I was told, “Don’t cry,” a lot. I was always told that I had to be strong. So I guess I did have to suppress my emotions somewhat. But I didn’t want to have to do that with Chad.

C & A:   Both of us came into the relationship with certain learned behaviors and expectations based on how we were raised and the kinds of things we heard growing up. As a result, sometimes when one of us says one thing, the other hears something else. We call them family filters. We all have them. They color the way we see, hear, think about, and react to things. And, man, can they cause a lot of conflict.

A:   One night, our friends Orin and Amaris (aka “Oris”!), who are also an interracial couple, had us over to their place for a double date over a dinner of salmon tacos (they get me). As we went to town on the tacos, they told us about two questions they ask when they feel like they’re missing each other: “What am I hearing because of my family filter? What are you hearing because of your family filter?”

Because of Chad’s family filter, my emotions in the car felt inappropriate, shocking, and unfamiliar. It made him think that something was wrong, needed his fixing, and that he needed to calm me down to correct and change what I was feeling.

C:   In my family, that kind of emotion was not typical. My parents never fought in front of people, especially us kids. So I learned to do the same: retreat to control my emotions and then speak. I tried to comfort Adaeze because I felt like the conversation was no longer productive with her heightened emotions.

A:   I grew up in an environment where talking about things with each other was a sign of respect, love, and trust. However, because I also grew up with the family filter of strength, meaning not crying, Chad’s attempt to stop me from crying made me feel like I was back in the environment of needing to buck up, be “strong,” and not cause a scene or make anyone feel uncomfortable.

C:   In my family, any emotions other than joy were supposed to be suppressed in conversation. When we let our emotions fly, it was treated as a sign of weakness or lack of control. When Adaeze got emotional over a question I asked, it made me feel like I had crossed a boundary that I shouldn’t have crossed.

I was trying to console her, but to her, it felt like I was no longer safe. And when she pulled away, I felt like I was being rejected.

A:   Having grown up in a family where I was unintentionally taught the opposite, it was huge for me to trust somebody to the point where I’m not only showing my emotions but fully feeling them while continuing the conversation. Because—surprise, surprise—women can cry and carry on an intellectual conversation at the same time, cuz we’re awesome, we’re bawsses, and we don’t need to suppress our emotions in order to think straight and continue talking to you level-headedly.

C:   Sidenote here: men, we can do the same thing.

A:   EYOOO!

As a Black woman in a world that tells me I’m not allowed to be anything but A STRONG BLACK WOMAN, it has taken me a long time to come to terms with my beautiful emotions, to accept that it’s okay to feel those emotions without being controlled by them, and to realize that doing so does not make me “too emotional” or “too sensitive.” So it wasn’t just that Chad reacted the way he did. There was a lot of negative history he unknowingly repeated for me in a moment when I was already feeling intense pain.

C:   We were actually seeking the same common ground. We were just coming at it from opposite directions because of the way we’d learned to express ourselves. Since I didn’t know about Adaeze’s family history or fully understand the cultural pressure she was operating out of, I responded in a way that was neither helpful nor fair to her.

I WAS COLORBLIND, BUT NOW I SEE

A:   Because we are two different people representing two different cultures who live in two different realities, we’ve had to learn how to communicate with each other and how to sit with each other while fully appreciating the other person and our differences. It takes a lot of time and patience, and this isn’t possible if we just see each other as extensions of ourselves. We have to see our differences in order to truly respect and appreciate someone else.

C:   My beautiful wife is one hundred percent correct. If we don’t take the time to see everything that has come behind a person, there’s no way we will be able to truly see the person who’s sitting right in front of us.

A:   Why do we accept the idea that we have to ignore the differences in our lovely skin tones in order to live peaceably with each other? Let’s upend the phrase “I don’t see color.” Even if it’s only intended figuratively, it doesn’t need to be said. For one thing, unless we’re talking about actual colorblindness, we do see different skin tones. It’s a shame some people feel a need to ignore or overlook something we should all love about ourselves—our skin. Second, contrary to the unspoken popular opinion, this statement doesn’t make people of a different race feel seen. In fact, it has the opposite effect. People of color are already seen as minorities—we don’t need more help in not being seen. Please, see us and everything that makes us us—and don’t apologize for seeing it. Celebrate it! Let’s have conversations about it.

C & A:   Being “colorblind” and ignoring our differences isn’t the answer. The answer is treating people who look different from you with respect.

Because of all the racial crap that has gone on in the world, some people feel nervous being around a person of a different race—not because they’re racist but because they don’t want to offend anyone. In fact, they may want to show support for the person—especially in the wake of racially charged incidents in our country—but they don’t know how.

That pressure is understandable, but it’s time to take that extra pressure off ourselves and treat everyone with respect, regardless of skin color. If you’re not sure how to do this, that’s okay. It’s a journey; just keep listening, loving, and putting in the time until you do.

This makes us think about Paul’s classic love verses: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7, ESV). We miss that when we “don’t see color,” because we’re all different. That’s the way God made us, and it’s beautiful. When we choose to love only those who look and sound exactly like us, it doesn’t do justice to the love the Lord showed us in the first place (Romans 5:8; Matthew 5:43-48). So, if we are truly going to love people and show the love of Christ through our actions, we have to love people for who they are—and that means seeing all the beautiful things that make them different from us.

In fact, let’s make this even easier, because, at the end of the day, it all boils down to one command. Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35, ESV).

That’s it. Love. Everybody. For exactly who they are.

Got it?

Cool?

Good talk.