A while ago a colleague told me they don’t hear race. Often the phrase is “I don’t see race,” in this case the person said they couldn’t hear any difference between what people were saying. The person was trying to tell me their colorblind approach was sufficient for the work done. I understood where the person was coming from but it was frustrating.

Not hearing race allows racism to continue — full stop, no other way around it. We need to train ourselves to understand the deeper context. It takes exposure, deeper understanding, and work to be able to distinguish the difference between what is said, not said, and how it is said.

After the Lāhaina fires on 8 August 2023, a lot of press from outside the state flew in to cover the tragedy. I’m guessing many of these reporters were not steeped in the local customs, culture, and ways of working in Hawai`i. In this clip you can hear a reporter ask a question and continually press for an answer. To many, it sounds like he’s doing his job. To those from Hawai`i it sounded like an outsider being rude, acting ‘high maka maka’ (above one’s station, or stuck up) and not allowing the person to finish his answer. The clip goes on to show Maui’s Mayor Bissen stepping forward and telling the reporter to let him finish talking and almost dared the reporter to stand at the podium to ask his question. When I watched that clip I thought, “That is so Hawai`i – you dare show up at someone else’s house and show disrespect.” I won’t speculate on what the Mayor was thinking, but his language was clear, we’re here to work with you as a reporter, but you will respect my people – you can ask hard questions but do it respectfully. That is what it means to hear race; understanding the said and not said nuances.

If you listen you’ll also hear the speakers using local language and inflections. The speaker says mauka — in Hawai`i there are two directions mauka-mountain and makai-ocean. Mayor Bissen is also clearly using local intonations. Were the reporters picking up on these, and were they expecting a more ‘white’ polished press conference? Even if the reporters would say it didn’t matter, it mattered — they would have had to think harder and work harder to make sense of what was being said; bias is real and our judgments when we have to think get skewed.

Not hearing race is dangerous

When we don’t hear race, we allow the status quo to continue or to favor whiteness. It is too easy to default to the common narratives; the narratives that say “it’s too hard,” or ‘It worked for everyone else so it should have worked for you.’ There have been so many times when a POC person have shared stories about how they had to jump through additional hoops because someone didn’t believe them. There is a tax on Black and Brown people who have to talk in ways to make themselves understood, versus having the receiver of the message work to understand.

POCs often can play games of code-switching where we turn on our ‘professional’ or ‘whiteness’ language so we can navigate places to be understood more easily. If we talked the way we talk to each other would people understand us or would they mock or dismiss us? Probably both.

Listen and Hear the difference

What I wanted to tell my colleague is, you don’t hear race because you haven’t learned how to hear it. It is time to get out of your bubble and begin to learn how to listen. When you don’t hear race you’re missing the deeper nuances, the stories beneath the surface. It isn’t your POC speakers’ job to lay everything out in a neat little novel for you to understand, it is your job to listen with integrity and to listen for understanding. If you need to learn how to listen, first you need to learn to be quiet — let others speak like Mayor Bissen said in his clip (I’m not defending his actions, I’m agnostic on how it went down). You need to listen in ways that allow the speaker to shape your thoughts, don’t just use your white or privileged frames of reference to relate everything to — stretch your thinking to be more inclusive of new understandings. Listen for meaning, don’t listen to take. People with privilege often listen to take in information. Information is currency, it can be used to gain more privilege. Instead, listen to show you care in a way that is humbling; you’re receiving a gift of someone sharing their story, honor that by understanding it in its full form.

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