Following the shooting in Charleston at Mother Emmanuel AME Church,I kept seeing hashtag after hashtag, one of the most common being #loveseesnocolor. The fact is that this is a lie. We’re a society in which color matters. Even putting together this webpage, I pondered the best color scheme for what it was going to say about us.

The fact is, color matters.  

My color determines my experience of the world, and color determines the way Thomas, my partner in this project, experiences the world, too.

When we talk about learning to love each other, we’re talking about a relationship in which we learn to see each other clearly and fully. To see me outside of the context of my white skin is to see only a portion of who I am. To see Thomas outside of the context of his brown skin is to see only a part of who he is.

Love is something that we do with eyes wide open. If we ignore color, we ignore a large part of someone’s identity. If we really want to love someone, we have to accept that the notion of colorblindness can’t be part of love because love is the act of learning to value the whole person, all of their experiences, in the context of their full identity.

These blogs, videos, podcasts, and other projects are our attempt to get to know each other and become intimate with the issues surrounding prejudice, privilege, and racism. We’re going in with both eyes open because we know that we can’t buy into the notion of a colorblind love because at the end of the day, love sees it all — our glory and our faults, our joys and our wounds, in three dimensional reality. Love doesn’t see in black and white, making us a dim parody of our true selves.

Love sees color.