I don't think they do. I have always believed this was obvious intellectually but have also personally experienced the 'seeing through the lens' and it was deeply alarming. I shall tell you what happened. https://twitter.com/fred_connection/status/1273252831684943872

I tend to binge research. Spend days just devouring multiple sources before trying to make some order of it & devise a plan. For one of our papers, 'The Joke's On You," I binge-read a load of books & papers on critical race theory.

Although I had read books & papers here and there for years, this was total submersion & it screwed up my mind. I tried to watch an episode of something like CSI to unwind my brain and there was a scene where a mixed race girl was graduating from university.

The writers of the scene clearly wanted to convey a much loved & confident young woman making a success of her life as she hugged both of her parents, beaming in her gown, but that wasn't what I saw. I saw power balances.

Her mother was white while the girl would be likely to be recognised in our current political landscape simply as 'black' & my mind went straight to white privilege & whether the girl was able to love her mother & how the family dynamics would work.

If you do not immediately recognise this as a terrible intuitive response to a touching family scene of proud parents & happy, successful daughter, you have probably also been too immersed in this poisonous, relationship-and-common-humanity-destroying stuff.

This lens stayed in my mind for days making it difficult for me to see people as simply people rather than pawns on a grid of power dynamics & it has never fully gone away. I am much more aware of race now & much more likely to make racist assumptions that I then need to unpick.

eg, I had to pick an image for an Areo article about the benefits of reading for pleasure & there was a perfect one of a young woman snuggled up cosily on a sofa clearly absorbed in a book. But she was black & this made me hesitate.

I thought "If I use her image, will it look like I think black people are the ones who need to be convinced that reading is a good thing? Will it look like tokenism? Will it look like imposing written modes of story-telling over oral ones as criticised by postcolonial scholars?"

Then I metaphorically slapped myself and used the image of a young woman enjoying a novel. But this is what reading this stuff does to your mind. It hinders you from seeing normal people doing normal things & imposes toxic power dynamics on everything.

And if it has this effect on me - someone with a particularly strong sense of humanism & liberal universalism & individualism - imagine what it does to someone who doesn't have these humanist intuitions and thought out liberal principles.

I later read Reni Eddo-Lodge's "Why I am no longer talking to white people about race" where she describes a situation in which a mixed-race friend became alienated from the white members of her family in precisely the way I described my own response to the graduation scene above