Blinded by the White: Challenging the Notion of a Color-Blind Meritocracy in the Academy

The purpose and presumption of peer review is that a community of colleagues raises one another's standards and quality of work by challenging, inciting, provoking, and inspiring more robust thinking and more rigorous analysis. The challenge, however, is that those who push the boundaries of any discipline invariably disrupt common-sense beliefs and sometimes long-held assumptions that undergird the field. This essay chronicles several examples of the hurdles faced by a White scholar doing work on race and racism and its impact on mentoring relationships, professional choices and opportunities, and review and publication in a major communication journal. I argue that a color-blind orientation to peer review is not value neutral, serves to reinforce and maintain the status quo, and is therefore antithetical to the scholastic enterprise.