Color Blind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro

by Margaret Halsey

Mass market paperback

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Margaret Halsey was an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her first book With Malice Toward Some grew out of her experiences there. It was a witty and humorous bestseller, selling 600,000 copies.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Phillip Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1946, the first half of this book mostly recounts Halsey's experiences volunteering in an interracial New York canteen during the war, moving on to a larger discussion of the roots for America's racial setup. Apart from the central argument that racism helped to ensure a supply of cheap labor, Halsey goes into surprising depth on the supposed sexual significance of the Negro vis-a-vis "civilized" society.

The book is clearly directed at white readers of a vaguely liberal slant, and what I found most interesting was her frank addressing of the difficulty whites of that time may have experienced, as their democratic ideals wrestled with a lifetime of taught prejudices.

Ultimately Halsey is optimistic that America's commitment to equality (recently reaffirmed by two world wars) will heal its racial divisions -- she even concludes with one of those "things you can do/recommended reading" chapters -- and I was frequently intrigued in comparing the past and present efforts and attitudes towards interracial and, more broadly, national cohesion. Despite a few somewhat dated or naive assertions, the book offers much food for thought, and left me feeling unusually proud of the principles for which America stands.

[Anna Katharine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed Margaret Halsey's memoir With Malice Towards Some, so when I learned that she had written about racism based on her WWII work as a managing hostess at the Stage Door Canteen in New York, I immediately hunted down a copy. The Stage Door was one of the few (or maybe the only?) integrated canteen(s) in the US, and Halsey provides unflinching accounts of the racism she encountered there, largely from white servicemen whose social sensibilities were offended by black soldiers dancing with white hostesses. (White hostesses who would not consent to entertain black soldiers were not hired.) Though neither a sociologist or anthropologist, Halsey was an observant, thoughtful writer who clearly chafed at the 'chronic and systematized injustice with which our Negro citizens have to contend.' With piercing candor, she describes what she sees as the two major elements of racism: the nation's economic need for cheap labor and the 'sexual bogeyman' that black men represent for white men. This book was published in 1945, so the language is dated, but many of the concepts and concerns are the same we face today. E.g.: "One of the most monotonous aspects of race relations in the US is the blind acceptance—by otherwise sensible people—of any wild, half-baked, fragmentary, unsubstantiated or even patently absurd cock-and-bull story that comes along, provided it has to do with Negroes." Confirmation bias will always plague us! As disheartening as it is to see how little progress our society has made, I found a lot of comfort in the fact that some white people, and especially some white women, were making intelligent and very public cases for racial equality—or, at least, for an absence of racial bigotry—in the decades before the Civil Rights movement. This was not a message I heard from white society growing up in the American south in the last decades of the twentieth century, and it's a relief to learn that, despite the danger that white women have posed to people of color for generations, there were at least some who stridently worked against racism. Halsey's concluding chapter presents many practical actions that remain effective today, though she does not address the ideas of tone policing and intercultural competency found in current antiracism literature. On the whole, I enjoyed the humor in this book, appreciated a contemporary account of social norms during WWII, and found inspiration in Halsey's willingness to speak up.