Reading 1

“Black” and “white”

How do “white” people use “race” and “color” to divide humanity?

Adjectives that signify, imply, connote, indicate, or suggest that the human race may be differentiated upon the basis of phenotype (e.g., hair type, skin color, shade, tone, or hue) are placed within quotes. These quotation marks indicate their fiction, social construction and fabrication. These words include “white,” “Black,” “brown,” “negro” and “of color.” There is but one race: the human race. Therefore, we also place the word “race” within quotation marks when it represents the false belief that the human species (that is, humanity) comprises distinct “races.”

Our people encompass an infinite continuum of skin tones, hair textures, nose shapes, and lip sizes. Just as “Black” people are not black, “white” people are not white — they range in shades from the very pallid to the swarthy, and encompass all shapes and sizes. Therefore, relegating “white” people to a pale-skinned, lighter-toned, blue-eyed, melanin-deprived, straight to curly-haired, thin-lipped, straight-nosed people is ludicrous. Moreover, there are millions of “Black” people with pale skin, straight hair, thin lips and straight noses. “White” people attempt to pigeon hole the breadth of our diversity with their artificial definitions and delineations to support their system of oppression. “Racial” descriptors maintain the false “racial” divisions that exist among “white” people, “Black” people, and people of every other “color.” The “white” concept of “race” is a farce.

“White” people perpetuate “white” hegemony and racism by: (1) rendering the “color” of one’s skin as the defining (or primary) qualitative characteristic of an individual’s identity; (2) profoundly misrepresenting and reducing the richness, fullness, and abundance of our people’s unrivaled diversity of hues, shapes, sizes, cultures and languages; and (3) polarizing “white” as the superior, norm and universal and “Black” as the inferior, subordinate, lesser, exception, outcast, outsider, untouchable or other.

(The terms Afro-American and African American are also problematic. Why choose to be identified by a name that was purportedly given 2,000 years ago by the Roman Empire to refer to the continent that birthed humanity over one million years ago?)

The answer to what constitutes “white” and “black” is based upon malleable social constructions — not indelible or immutable genetic facts or truisms. The concept of separate human races does not exist in nature or science, but solely within the falsely reductionist “white” mind. Despite the “best” attempts of racist geneticists (eugenicists) to demonstrate the contrary, science has conclusively proven that not only are all humans descendants of a common ancestor, but that this “common ancestor” originated in sub-Saharan Africa. Sound genetic science has done away with the ignorance and untruths of the false “race” narrative. The biological sciences have proven that there is no “white,” “Black,” “brown,” “red,” “yellow,” or “tan” “race.” There is only the human race. But the strength of the social construction of “race” persists for one very important reason: it justifies, proliferates, validates and maintains the unequal socio-economic, political, religious, intellectual, and military status quo. Accordingly, the author’s use of such terms in quotes will serve as a perpetual reminder of their artificiality.

In our world, the “color” of one’s skin is not a biological reality, but a political reality that informs every human relationship and activity in virtually all modern societies. Consequently, we will never collectively move beyond the fallacious “Black color” of our skin — which is the racist’s most powerful tool for “racial” identification and differentiation — if we continue to ignorantly use such “color” to refer to our ethnicity and supposed “race.”