Skin Color-Is it a Description or Race?

While writing this post about my children wanting to be black, I started thinking about race. Barack Obama is being hailed as, potentially, the first black president. But, for those people saying this, I have three questions. First, are you referring to skin color or race? If you are referring to skin color, please understand, that man is brown! Get your eyes checked. If you are referring to race, and I'm assuming you are, how did you decide what race to name him? His mother is white and his father was black. Does having a black father cancel out the white mother? Third, why does it matter?

I read in an opinion column recently that race matters. Then, I read that the first thing you notice about someone should not be their skin color. Another time, I read about a mom who was proud of her child because when they come home from school, they talk about the little boy in the blue shirt, not the little black boy. She was proud because her son didn't notice the little boy's skin color (I'd argue that he did, but that it just wasn't important to him, whereas the color of the kid's shirt was).

The idea that to be racially equal, we must take skin color out of our purview is ridiculous. In order to do that, we would all need to be either blind or the same color. There are people out there that want this scenario:

"Well, officer, the man was 6'2" tall. He had black hair, brown eyes, a roman nose and thin lips. He was wearing a red polo shirt that was missing the middle button of three. He had on faded blue jeans and flip flops. What color was his skin? Oh my gosh, I don't pay attention to that kind of thing!"

Now, seriously people, the epidermis is the largest visible part of the human body. There is no reason not to notice the color of the skin. The very act of being so conscience of skin color as to block that aspect of someone's makeup from your mind is, in itself, a form of racism. The key is not to block color recognition from your mind, rather it is to make skin color about color and not race.

Race is not about skin color at all. It is more about culture than anything else. That is why there are black people who have been accused of betraying the black people, or of acting white. That is why, when a white person "joins" the rap culture, they are accused of acting black. It is about a culture, not the color of a person's skin. The white youth that grew up in a black neighborhood will more closely identify to the culture in that neighborhood. So, if that neighborhood is a poor one, with gang activity, he will most likely identify with gangs. If that neighborhood (like the one I grew up in) is solidly middle class, he will most likely identify with all other middle class cultures, even if he does show a decided preference for black women in his romance life. If he grew up in a rich neighborhood, he will have all the privilege that he would have had in a white neighborhood and his life will be no different than had he grown up in a rich white neighborhood. The fact is that it has nothing to do with color of skin at all. It is all about the culture of the people. Those people can be black, white, purple or orange. The fact of the matter is that the people you grow up with shape your life. If you were a different race, it wouldn't change that fact.

The people in this country need to stop thinking in terms of "black culture", "white culture" and "Latino culture". The fact is that while these cultures may have started in one or another community, they are permeating through society. The answer is not to force conformity, rather it is to allow people to slowly accept the fact that regardless of skin color, people are all the same and different across the board. It will take years of assimilation for this to happen everywhere. You cannot wave a magic wand and expect people to suddenly accept what you tell them. They must see for themselves that something is true. I'll give you a personal example. There was a person I met some 11 years ago. This person made the comment that, "All black men are studs or drug dealers." The only black men this person had been exposed to were the deadbeat dads of the children this person was seeing every day. This person came from a small town where black men were not even close to a majority. So, what this person saw was a population of people who were deadbeats. This person did not need to be told that not all black people were like that. They needed to see it for themselves. I believe that they have in the ensuing years, but that phrase has stuck with me. A black person who has only been exposed to bigots, needs to see for himself that not all white people are bigots.

As our community slowly becomes more integrated (through the natural flow of society), our people will become less and less aware of race as a culture and more aware of skin color as a description.