I didn’t say it was colourblind did I Roderick?

I said that when I was at school (where most of the students were people of colour and I was the only white person in my friend group) I didn’t think of my friends as FOREMOST being a different race than me.

Of course I knew that they were. I knew their cultural backgrounds and the fact their skin colour was different to mine.

But I didn’t go around thinking of my friend Medha as “my Bangladeshi friend Medha", my friend Ellen as “my Filipina friend Ellen" or my friend Lisa as “my Chinese friend Lisa", even though I knew their races. I thought of them as individuals first, I thought of their personalities, I thought about Ellen was the first person at the school to see me awkwardly sitting alone in the playground and invite me to be a part of her group, and how that warmed my heart given I was bullied in my previous school. How Lisa was always top of the class and inspired me to work harder, how Medha was always passionate about social justice and how she opened my mind to a world beyond what my bigoted and abusive mother taught me about LGBTQ people. How my friend Sang was a brilliant artist who loved Pokemon. Etc. I thought of all the shared memories we’d made together.

I didn’t second guess every action of mine around them because I was white. I didn’t assume they saw me as an oppressor BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T.

Even though we all knew about Australia’s racist history and how it affected them in different ways.

This isn’t colour blindness but it isn’t colour myopia either.

Please don’t strawman my nuanced point about how teaching racism is important but teaching kids to see each other as individuals is too. Since you yourself argued for this to a large degree in your own article.