Michael Chandler's Colorblind Madness

Michael Chandler is set to face Conor McGregor at UFC 303 in June 2024. Naturally, to promote the fight, Chandler has been making media appearances. His recent long-form interview on the Shawn Ryan Show has made social media waves for all of the wrong reasons. Nothing he said about the upcoming bout garnered any attention; rather, all of the attention has been placed on his ludicrous comments about raising black children.

Intriguingly, the interviewer came up with a smart question about the challenges that arise when raising black children. He asked: “I have a tough question to ask you, but I think it’s important. Your adopted children are black. I would imagine, if it hasn’t happened already, there are going to be issues…tough issues...that you are going to encounter with them. Both a lot of questions…maybe things that you can’t relate to. I mean, have you thought about how you are going to tackle stuff like that when it arises?”

Chandler’s answer started off promising. He talked about the importance of asking God for wisdom in dealing with the situation; however, he then proceeded to give the most unwise answer that would make any person who understands the complexities of being a black man in America concerned about the black boys that Chandler is raising. When grappling with the question of how a “white dude from Missouri is going to raise black children,” Chandler, while admitting that he was giving the wrong answer that would rub people the wrong way, said: “I’m not raising black children; I’m raising children. I’m not raising black men; I am raising men.” Chandler then goes on to correctly point out that there are some universal characteristics that magnanimous men should possess, but it does not follow to then argue that it makes sense to raise black children without regard to their color.

When listening to someone promoting the farcical ideology of colorblindness, if one listens long enough, it becomes abundantly clear that they think blackness is an albatross. They think blackness is essentially a curse. After all, one does not need to ignore characteristics that they consider positive. Chandler’s commentary in this interview is no different. Chandler made a point of needing to “bulletproof his children’s minds” because they will not be able to be exactly like him due to their different skin color. This is precisely the wrong way to approach raising children of a different race. Adopted children can never be exactly like their adoptive parents, and this is even more true when there are racial differences. Adopted children in mixed-race homes should be raised to be race-conscious and be encouraged to develop a variety of role models, including those that actually look like them. Chandler should be raising his children to look up to someone like Israel Adesanya, rather than solipsistically fixating on them wanting to be just like him.

One of the most irksome traits of proponents of colorblindness is that they act as if they are saying something so sociopolitically revolutionary and deeply profound when they argue that we need to transcend race. Chandler gave a good example of this kind of thought. He said: “We think that the most important thing about us is our skin color, or our gender, or our sex, or our political affiliation, or all these different identity politics or the identities that we put on each other when really we are just human beings on this earth and there are certain things about being a good person that transcend skin color, and age, and sex, and religion and all of those different things.”

Identity markers are not the most important things about people, but that does not mean they are unimportant. It is simply not insightful to point out that being a good human being matters more than your skin color because no compos mentis person who doesn’t don pointed white hoods and burn crosses on people’s lawns as a pastime has ever argued otherwise.

The problem is that colorblindness is childish utopianism disguised as sociopolitical brilliance. Such colorblind rhetoric is reminiscent of the wide-eyed six-year-old who claims that when they have a million dollars, they are going to buy all the pizza and candy they can afford. An adult understands that there are practical realities that make such a desire implausible in the real world. First, a million dollars is really $600,000 (if that!) after taxes. Second, dealing with the practicality of owning all the pizza and candy in the world would present significant challenges. And, finally, there are more important things to do with money like paying bills and investing in the future.

The idea that society can suddenly do away with an identity marker like race—as if it were invented fifteen minutes ago by an Ivy League sociologist and has no social meaning—is imbecilic. To believe that eliminating race is possible, one would have to be wholly ignorant of the social world. One cannot arbitrarily decide to erase race as a construct when it has been a defining element in shaping the history of the world. Colorblindness could perhaps be possible in a world prior to the advent of racism and its ungodly children of colonialism, slavery, and other “isms.” Thinking of designing such a world today makes no sense whatsoever.

To be clear, theoretically, I am not against white people adopting and raising black children. I think it would be unfair to posit that there are no white people capable of doing a commendable job of raising black children in a way that affirms their racial identity. White people who raise black children without regard to race, however, are creating an insidious cocktail of future problems for those children who will be utterly ill-equipped to handle the challenges of being black, especially in the Western world. Contrary to the jejune fantasies of the colorblind, raising black children without regard to their blackness in America is not empowerment; rather, it is preparation of their catastrophic failure.