This made me think about the issue of representation of people of color in literature. In many ways, we can look at some novels as colorblind, because the authors do not mention the race of the characters in them. But because these novels take place in and cater to mainstream society, readers are encouraged to assume that the characters are white. So then no representation of any race simply becomes an exclusive representation of whiteness. Ignoring color very quickly becomes only seeing white.

This statement made me think about James Baldwin's discussion of history in The White Man's Guilt. In it, he states that, "...people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world." Because race is socially constructed, and white people perpetuated this construction, then we hold the power to disengage from race, and see ourselves as raceless. What I mean by raceless, and what I understand the article to mean by this term as well, is that the race does not go away, but it is not the transient component of my identity. I, as a white person, get to be viewed as an individual rather than as a representation of my race. I suppose that the way to extend this privilege to others would be, to continue Baldwin's metaphor, to release the pin in order to be able to challenge ourselves and the structures that surround us. But how does a butterfly release themself from their pin?