Diane Gusa uses the term “white blindness” to describe an ideology that “obscures and protects White identity and White privilege” while simultaneously espousing the “neutral” concept of color blindness (p. 477). Here, we will use the terms “white evasiveness” and “color evasiveness,” which we think more accurately capture the impact while also avoiding ableist language (Annamma, Jackson, & Morrison, 2015).
Color evasiveness “contends that everyone is the same,” ignoring and undermining legacies of racism and White supremacy (477). By negating discourse around racism, color evasiveness effectively renders Whiteness the hidden, invisible norm, and never the cause of racial inequality.
White evasiveness means librarians might think of their collections as “neutral” rather than as expressions of White privilege, and therefore not in need of diversification. It can lead to ignoring the overwhelming white domination in our collections, and instead simply adding a few token diverse titles to a collection. White evasiveness can also be seen in cataloging systems that set whiteness as the default (such as creating subheadings for non-white racial or ethnic groups, classifying books from diverse authors in separate areas of the library).
A critical view of individual texts as well as institutional decisions and policies can help mitigate the effects of White evasiveness, as can the acknowledgement and naming of Whiteness as a condition in which collections were and are built, cataloged, and maintained. Working against White evasiveness also requires commitment to “White responsibilities on a multicultural campus,” discussed further in the section on White Estrangement below (478).