"Color blindness" is an interesting concept. I'm not sure it's the "ideal." I never even thought about it until about a year ago, when I said something like, "As a writer, it's rarely important to me if someone sees my characters as Black or white or brown. If I were lucky enough to have a story of mine turned into a movie, I'd just be thrilled - I don't care who plays the parts." And I realized that it's not so much color-blindness, but whiteness-as-the-default, that's a problem. Rather than write racially ambiguous characters, I was urged to write in lead roles for Black characters (which is scary, when in the same breath, we white authors are told DON'T DO THAT!!! and made to feel we'd be better off setting everything off-world and inventing new races and skin colors and whole new socio-political problems for them to deal with!) I'm kidding about that last part, but it can be nerve-wracking, worrying too much about getting things right and not pissing EVERYONE off.

My point, though, is that I never think of myself as "white," "hetero," "cis-gender" - but I do think of myself as a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer. Things that set me apart from others but in both positive and negative ways. Those immutable characteristics that don't generally conflict with the community I live in day to day? I don't even think about them AT ALL. They are MY default. That's not a good or bad thing, but it did give me a different perspective on how we THINK about racism or any other -ism.