Pensieri di un lunatico minore

White is just a color

Everywhere you look, on billboards, advertisements, television, print, the Internet, music and the back of cereal boxes, there are labels. Not labels to indicate price or some unique identifier so that a machine can more easily tally your purchases, but rather a label so that others might more easily categorize you for analysis. These labels are applied by the government, industry, your friends, family and co-workers, journalists too lazy to dive into the complexity of humanity and CEOs looking for the next big “market.”

What is it that makes us as humans want to categorize each-other in neat little boxes? Are we afraid of the individual? Are we afraid that our prejudices will not survive a more rigorous examination? Why do we insist on labeling someone as white, when their actual skin tone is certainly olive-tinged?

One area where people most often use these convenient labels is in the discussion of race. Webster’s defines race as follows:

1. a breeding stock of animals
2. a: a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock
   b: a class or kind of people unified by community of interests, habits, or characteristics (the English race)
3. a: an actually or potentially inter-breeding group within a species; also : a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group
   b: BREED c: a division of mankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type
4. (obsolete) inherited temperament or disposition
5. distinctive flavor, taste, or strength

What bothers me most is that we somehow think that “white” or “black,” which are clearly colors are somehow indicative of “a class or kind of people unified by community of interests, habits, or characteristics.” This is a fallacy of the highest order. There are perhaps some commonality shared because of skin color, whatever color it may be, but the truth is that someone of dark skin tone from Ethiopia is more likely to have something in common with someone from England in many ways than they are to have something in common with someone of a similar skin tone from a Carribean nation. People are bound more strongly by their past experiences, shared and defining, than they are by the simple color of their eyes.

Why then are we so eager to categorize people so quickly? Perhaps there was a time in our not-so-proud past that we might have quickly lumped people together for purposes of disenfranchisement, but today, why must we continue to do so? The 2000 US Census asked a question (PDF) on race, phrased thusly:

What is Person 1’s race?

The person answering the questionnaire was then allowed to respond with multiple affirmatives to one of the following possible answers:

1. White
2. Black, African Am., or Negro
3. American Indian or Alaskan Native
4. Asian Indian
5. Chinese
6. Filipino
7. Japanese
8. Korean
9. Vietnamese
10. Native Hawaiian
11. Guamanian or Chamorro
12. Samoan
13. Other Asian
14. Other Pacific Islander
15. Some other race

With some of these (specifically numbers 3, 13, 14), additional “write in” spaces are allowed. Oddly, however, there was an additional question targeted at one specific group:

Is Person 1 Spanish/Hispanic/Latino

And the respondent was given the following possible answers:

1. No, not Spanish/Hispanic/Latino
2. Yes, Puerto Rican
3. Yes, Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano
4. Yes, Cuban
5. Yes, other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino

With the last possible response, additional information could be provided to further flesh out the definition.

What strikes me most unusual about this is that some of these might be considered ethnicities, some are skin color, some are potentially race and others are nationalities. All are lumped together as if they provide some insight into someone based on some arbitrary equalization of people.

How could one separate those who are from Iran and those from Iraq? How does one differentiate between those of Japanese Hawaiian decent and those of other backgrounds? In a world where we are all mutts, and most Americans have mixed blood backgrounds, what insight is gained by this centuries old conceptualization of “race?”

Why do we differentiate between Mexican and Cuban, but lump all people of dark skin tone together as simply “black?” Does this provide some insight, or is it simply a further use of language to arbitrarily define others so that they might more easily be treated as a group as opposed to individuals?

I propose it is likely that a “white” woman and a “black” woman from Alabama have more in common than a “white” woman from Alabama does with a “white” woman from Idaho. If we are defined by are shared histories, then we are more defined by where we grow up and the community around us than we are by the color of our skin.

To understand the human race, we must move beyond color to understand our common concepts and background, our history and futures. We should make a conscious effort to judge people based on who they are, what they have accomplished with an eye to what they have endured, but not to make generalizations based simply on their skin color or heritage.