Interactive Questions on Racism

There is nothing about your skin that makes you black or white (or red or yellow). Dress shoes are often black, but never skin tone. Not even in “deepest, darkest Africa.” Tennis shoes are often white, but never skin tone. Not even albinos. Skin tone comes in countless shades of brown.

There are an infinite variety of fleshy browns, ruddy-browns, golden-browns, cocoa browns, and faintest browns. There is every hue of brown. There is an infinity of brown skin tones. This is why the WARF Flag has a blood red infinity symbol on a background continuum of shades of brown. Skin tone is, in fact, the opposite of “black or white.”

Your parents each have a unique skin tone, and so do you. Even if they look similar to your eye, a scientific instrument could measure differences in the amount of melanin (color) in their skin. Since your parents are neither black or white (or yellow or red), you cannot be black or white (or yellow or red). We are all just a special shade of brown.

No one’s ancestors came from black or white. Most people use the terms “black” and “white” as a shorthand way of saying “your ancestors are from Africa” or “your ancestors are from Europe.” But this slang is harmful because it creates artificial divisions among people on a specious, or irrelevant, basis. Over the ages there has been much mixing of genes due to migrations, invasions and travel. You cannot know where a person’s ancestors are from by looking at their skin tone.

Instead, it is just a stereotype – a kind of potentially harmful generalization – to think that people with darker skin are descended just from Africans and people with lighter skin are descended just from Europeans. Look past the skin tone to the soul, and you will know that we are all descended from one earth.

Over the generations, society has developed labels to stick on people based on some aspect of their appearance. The fact that a label is developed means that the labeled aspect of their appearance is relevant or important to that society. One of the main labels current society uses to describe people are “black or white.” For example, “the suspect is a white male.” The reason this skin tone label is used so much is because of racism.

For hundreds of years, and up through today, a person’s rights and privileges depended on how much they resembled most of the people currently living in Europe or most of the people currently living in Africa. This is because European countries used their advanced technology to conquer and colonize the world, with the greatest oppression being inflicted upon people living in Africa. To justify their actions as “fair”, the European intellectuals developed theories that people from Europe were “superior” to other people, and especially to people from Africa.

As these theories filtered down to the masses, “European” was slanged to “white” and “African” was slanged to “black.” It was important to label people as white or black so that society would know who was free and who was slave, who got privileges and who got shafted, and even who could marry whom. If society was not racist, i.e., if there was no reason to treat people differently based on their skin tone, then there would be no labels for race. This is why we say “race is fiction, racism is real.”