“[W]hen I was growing up, the most liberal thing you could do is not see color. Well, that’s wrong now.”

“You see color, always, so you can register your white privilege. But I grew up in the Martin Luther King era: Judge by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I still think that’s the best way to do it. Not see it.”

Said Bill Maher, in a NYT interview, “Bill Maher on the Perils of Political Correctness.”

The interviewer pushes him: “But we do see color, and no one is arguing that people shouldn’t be judged by their character. So what problem is being caused by the shift you just described?”

He responds: “If someone walks in the room, after a minute, I should not be thinking about color. And I am not. That’s how I have always been. I have actual black friends. I don’t think they want me to be always thinking: Black person. Black person. I’m talking to a black person. Look, I tried to drive a stake through political correctness in the ’90s. I obviously failed dismally. It’s worse than ever.”

Actually, that’s not a response to the question asked. He just changed the subject. I’d have liked to see some depth to the discussion of what problems have arisen because, as a culture, we gave up on the ideal of color blindness, which was so clear and dominant in the 1960s. The questioner put the issue out there, but Maher’s answer was, essentially, I still like the old color blindness approach. The question was, what’s the harm in the seeing-color approach that liberals these days insist upon?

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