Reading · Ceci Bell, Ph.D.

Dear Pharrell Williams,

Yes, politics are divisive. I don’t like politics either, but to say that “when you pick a side, you are inadvertently supporting division” [1] is not a luxury that many people of color have in this country. Neutrality is a farce. Neutrality is picking sides. Neutrality in a white supremacist society is choosing the side of the oppressor because colorblindness is erasure….erasure of any identities that are different from the dominant, mainstream identity. The falseness of neutrality is that neutrality is “a code word for the existing system [of whiteness]” [2]. Many of us can’t afford to feign neutrality in a system that can’t make up its mind on whether they can see us (hypervisibility that is fostered through stereotypes, tropes, and the white gaze) or not (invisibility).

The invisibility syndrome is a model that has been present within African Americans for decades. The invisibility syndrome is defined as when your feelings and beliefs that your personal talents, abilities, and character are not acknowledged or valued by the larger society due to racial prejudice. [3]

Dear white people,

When you don’t see my color, my Blackness….you don’t see me. I am invisible to you. And if I am invisible to you, you don’t have to address the injustices I may experience in life because of the skin I am in. The egg carton image is a good representation of the reason colorblindness or race neutrality is not cool. The angry white eggs in the carton represent society’s ills created by white hegemony (supremacy). The brown egg is us, us Black folks, us people of color, who are just supposed to sit there and take it…happily!...and ignore our feelings of hypervisibility and invisibility for the sake of race neutrality.

My fellow GenXrs (me and Pharrell are the same age) continue to bug out in the 2020s, omg. It behooves me that people who espouse a colorblind ideology can’t understand how “I don’t see color” is RACISM in 2025! I used to be one of those people as a young person in the 1980s, who thought that colorblindness was a good thing, King-like (MLK), because that’s the narrative that was pushed in the media and school. Dr. King’s quotes were often (and still) are used and pulled out of context.

I remember writing a scholarship essay my senior year in high school about having a dream and using the popular quote: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a 2013 CBS News article, MLK’s “content of character” quote inspires debate - CBS News, the author poses the question: “Would King have wanted us to completely ignore race in a ‘color-blind’ society? To consider race as one of many factors about a person? And how do we discern character?” This was written while we had our first Black president (President Obama) and relishing in a faux post-racial society.

The meaning of King’s monumental quote is more complex today than in 1963 because “the unconscious signals have changed,” says the historian Taylor Branch, author of the acclaimed trilogy “America in the King Years.”
Fifty years ago, bigotry was widely accepted. Today, Branch says, even though prejudice is widely denounced, many people unconsciously pre-judge others.
“Unfortunately race in American history has been one area in which Americans kid themselves and pretend to be fair-minded when they really are not,” says Branch.

It’s crazy whiplash to read the CBS article while experiencing life in America in 2025.

But in 2025, people should know better because there has been so much awareness brought to the topic through wokeness.

Racism comes in many forms. People of color, including Black people, can experience internalized racism. Colorblindness is a characteristic of internalized racism. In Black racial identity develoment theory, [4] a Black person with a race neutral stance (or race neutral racial identity attitude) is experiencing the lowest, most immature stage of Black racial identity development. These people often experience some or all of these accompanying characteristics (miseducation, Eurocentric cultural perspective, spotlight or race image anxiety, self-hatred, and assimilationist perspective), along with other racial identity attitudes (low Blackness salience or low Blackness importance, social stigma, anti-Black).

Race neutrality is a damaging thing for fostering positive Black racial identity development.

We often talk about white privilege, but there’s also CLASS privilege.

This is “rich” coming from Pharrell: “If diversity, equity and inclusion ever comes back in style, cool. But in the mean time, I’m gonna focus on being the best because I can bank on that.” Newsflash, Pharrell. It’s because you are rich that you can bank on that. Check out the Roots article, which includes comments from other Black folk online about how they feel about Pharrell’s apolitical stance. This one sums it up for me:

For @Pharrell to monetize his Blackness and benefit from Black money and then tell the Black folks he’s left behind not to pursue political outcomes that will keep them safe (from the harms they helped him buy his way out of) is callous af.

What do you think about Pharrell’s comments. Share in the comments.

“I don’t see color” is RACISM

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