To Kim Kardashian and Eve on raising biracial, colorblind kids: Stop kidding yourselves!
OPINION - Why on earth would they want their children or any other children with 20/20 vision not to notice that human beings have skin tones ranging from the lightest of beige to the richest shades of brown?
Both rapper Eve and reality TV star Kim Kardashian have been recently quoted as saying they want their biracial children not to see color.
Eve recently opened up to Vibe Vixen about her relationship with white British race car driver, Maximillion Cooper. Eve is moving towards marriage and children with Maxmillion, and when discussing raising biracial children she stated, “I want them to be colorblind… I don’t want them to see color.”
Surprisingly, Eve echoed the words of Armenian-American TV star Kim Kardashian, who is currently expecting a biracial child with African-American rapper Kanye West. In March, Kim said in an interview with BET that the “most important thing is, the way I want to raise my children is to not see color.”
Well, good luck with that…
Is anyone really “colorblind”?
My first question is: why on earth would they want their children or any other children with 20/20 vision not to notice that human beings have skin tones ranging from the lightest of beige to the richest shades of brown? To me, that is like expecting children not to notice that grass is green and that roses are red, while violets are blue.
Isn’t it human nature to perceive color? Why would we want to suppress that when the color pertains to human beings?
Noticing racial colors might be natural. It is thus unlikely that Eve and Maximillion or Kim and Kanye will be able to suppress this perception through their parental influence.
Secondly, even if this aspect of human nature could be suppressed, with no disrespect, I’m not sure that these parents would be capable of creating the family environment necessary to promote color blindness.
As recently as November 2012, Eve herself noticed color as she stated in an interview with Angie Martinez that sometimes she looks at Maxmillion and thinks, “‘You are so white.’ Seriously!” — and that sometimes she still can’t believe she’s dating a white guy.
I bet that Maxmillion more than “notices” Eve’s brown skin. He probably highly admires it.
Kim and Kanye: Likely color-aware
Do you think that Kim Kardashian has failed to notice or admire Kanye West’s dark skin and the deeper browns of her former lovers, such as Ray J and Reggie Bush? As she is a woman with a long, public history of dating black men, I don’t.
Kanye has also been known to notice color, a lot. It is reported that in a 2006 interview with Essence, he told the magazine that, “If it wasn’t for race mixing, there would be no video girls,” and then offensively referred to biracial women as “mutts,” as he stated that “me and most of my friends like mutts a lot…yeah in the hood they call them mutts.”
The statement that if there were no biracial women there would be no video girls appears to imply that darker, non-mixed black women are not attractive enough to be video models. (Using white models is often deemed unacceptable by artists and audiences, because this seems antithetical to hip hop is an “authentic” African-American art form.)
West’s comment manifests a clear ability to see color, and perhaps the belief that lighter is inherently “righter.”
