RACE
Let’s Talk about Skin Color
The paradox of race is that it is both meaningless and yet needs to be studied
As America gears up for the 2024 presidential campaign, a variety of Republican contenders, chief among them Ron DeSantis, are doing their absolute best to dethrone the Grand Poohbah, otherwise known as “The Donald,” the man who gives lie to the statement “It can’t happen here.” To achieve this difficult task, these campaigners are going all out to garner support from the GOP base, a group which seems to emphatically embrace the wildest of conspiracy theories, the sort that would seem implausible to a five-year-old of average intelligence.
Of course, not surprisingly, many of them are racist in nature, and eschew logic and commonsense. This portion of the population is also vulnerable to the DeSantis attacks on “Wokeism,” a concept he has never adequately defined.
The only thing that DeSantis and other adherents of Trumpism dislike more than Wokeism is something they call “critical race theory.” Trumpists with school-aged children are in an uproar because they fear this “theory” is being taught to their offspring. The way they discuss the matter demonstrates they neither understand what CRT is, nor do they realize that it isn’t actually being taught, not as a class or subject.
Critical race theory is nothing more than a way of thinking critically about “race” and the role it has played, in all aspects of life, throughout American history. It’s more about asking challenging questions than about indoctrination. If you tell me that you’re against doing critical thinking (about any subject), I’ll tell you that you’re making an argument in favor of ignorance and stupidity.
I’m married to a woman who has a much darker skin pigmentation than I have. This fact provides us with ample opportunities to have interesting and entertaining conversations about skin color. My wife, a woman who hails from northeast Africa, will often begin such conversations by pointing out that she is “black” and that I am “white.” When I hear such a claim, I remind her that, in fact, she is the color of caramel or coffee that has had milk poured into it.
In describing myself, I always say that I am a little beige and that some parts are beiger than others. But I have been known to have pinkish blotches here and there, especially on my face, which makes me wonder if I’m more beige or more pink. I always conclude that I’m not actually a “white man” — just like my wife isn’t a “black woman.” I’m more of a pink man with lots of beige mixed in. Having said that, what am I to make of those very dark freckles I have on my arms and elsewhere?
I hope you see how ridiculous it is to focus on skin color when thinking about human beings. By referring to people as black, brown, or white, we force them into categories that have no bearing on actual reality. In fact, there are almost no people in the world who are truly black, brown, or white. Designating them as one of these three is a way of caricaturing them.
Most of us are on a continuum between extremes. And any single individual’s colorations can vary a lot depending on all sorts of things. In fact, there have been times in my life, mostly when I was younger and did manual labor jobs, when I was quite tanned, even “brownish.” Did that mean I became a different sort of person when I was in that state? Did I become a “person of color”? Should I have thought less of myself when I was darker? Should others have thought about me differently?
We might as well start categorizing people by hair types. Let’s designate those with straight hair of higher rank than those with curly locks. In such a scheme, where do bald people fit in?
The fact that race plays such a key role in our lives says a lot of not-so-flattering things about too many of us (and it’s a good argument for the implementation of an educational program akin to critical race theory but on a massive scale). Those who would argue that people with “white” skin are somehow divinely intended to be “in charge” are full of you know what. And those who think they can perpetually use skin color as a way of dividing us are going to be sorely disappointed going forward. I see a definite trend toward color blindness as we intermingle and intermarry. In the future, it’s almost certain that we’ll all be “people of color.”
