Brandon J. O'Brien

“Many white Westerners feel that the worst thing they could be called is a racist. We know deep down that we're not supposed to make value distinctions between people of different ethnicities, as if it's better to be white or Black or whatever. Because we're hesitant to make value distinctions, and rightfully so, we're often slow to make any distinctions at all. Thus it goes without being said for many that to be truly equal everyone must be the same.

This is what we mean by being colorblind—the belief that ethnic differences don't matter. Of course it would be fine if what we meant was that everyone should be treated with equal dignity or enjoy the same rights. But we suspect what is commonly meant is that everyone should be treated as if they were the same, and by same, what is frequently meant is majority culture.

Consequently, we are trained to assume that ethnicity is unimportant, and that prejudice on the basis of ethnicity is an impossible motivation for behavior. We avoid making an issue a race issue unless there's no way around it, because we have convinced ourselves that ethnicity is no longer a factor in social situations. This leaves us somewhat schizophrenic, because we all know that we carry latent prejudices privately, while we are trained to pretend publicly that we don't.”
― Brandon J. O'Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible