Conspiracy of Truth Blog

The other day a friend of mine said to me that they weren’t racist because they didn’t see color. They only saw the person. Something about the statement hit me wrong and I wanted to argue but I couldn’t figure out what about it rubbed me the wrong way. I had to think about it for several days before it came to me. I was sitting at work and we were creating a template for tracking and one coworker suggested some colors but another spoke up and said some of those colors didn’t work for them because they don’t see those colors. It was when they said that that I realized what about my friend’s statement bugged me. If we do not see color then all we see is black and white. It is a divisive line. If we can not see the varying shades of color around us then we must inevitably see things in black and white, and everything we see then gets divided in either category. You are either white or you are black. And all the gray is divided depending on the person making the divisions. But the point is that it is a division. A person is either one or the other.

When I was a kid I used to love seeing rainbows. I still do. But when I was a kid I used to study the rainbows until they disappeared or I couldn’t see them any longer. I’d look and look trying to determine where the red ended and the orange began. Where did the yellow become green? Where did the violet end and the sky begin? It was so tenuous, the colors just blended from one to the other that I could never tell where one ended and the other began. But it was the blending, the soft shift from one to the other that make rainbows so beautiful.

When I am filling out government and demographic forms I am white. I check the box because that is the group I have been told is what I identify most closely. But when I look at my skin it is like the rainbow. If you look at my inner forearm, it is a pale cream color. My inner wrist is a paler cream with blue veins tracking through it. (Phlebotomists love me. My niece is a phlebotomist and has told me countless times how juicy my veins are. Why are phlebotomists so weird?) When I turn my arm over, the skin is a darker cream like a cappuccino with freckles of numerous sizes all over. My skin looks like the reverse of an image of space from a telescope where hundreds and hundreds of stars can be seen. It’s summer so my arms are tan. In the winter they will grow pale and my freckles will stand out even more. So can I really be white?

If we look at the other side – my genealogy, well that is a mess too. I’m Jewish and Catholic, Italian, Polish, Swedish, and Russian. But it is all just names. At the end of the day, they are ways we can find commonalities and differences between and among us. It is when we use those labels to oppress each other that the labels stop being ways to identify likeness and differences and become ways to punish and perpetuate cruelty that we need to unravel. So lets stop saying we don’t see color. When we say we don’t see color it is admitting that we refuse to see the ways in which our neighbors and friends are being oppressed and we are perpetuating cruelty. Instead, be kind and love color.