COMMON SENSE - Race in America. Who is a Person of Color?

Back in the 40's and 50's when I was growing up people used to say somebody was "colored". It wasn't really a pejorative term then. In fact, the NAACP used the word in their name. Then came the 60's and it became a bad word. If you said that a person was "colored" the really hip people would mock you and ask what color he or she was. During those civil rights days the point was that a superficial thing like skin pigmentation wasn't supposed to be how you judged someone. The idea was for everyone to integrate together in the melting pot and become Americans.

 

Nowadays skin pigmentation seems to be a person's most important quality. We now have our society divided up into "people of color" ("colored" is still not permissible) and "white". But it's hard to put your finger on exactly what is meant by these terms. Southern Italians are a lot more pigmented than Norwegians, but that doesn't seem to count. Is it that you have some African heritage? But "Hispanics" seem to be included too. AOC says she's a person of color, but it would be hard to pick her out of a crowd in Calabria. Same with Kamala Harris, who is the daughter of a lighter skinned Jamaican father and Indian mother.

 

Well, maybe it has to do with social standing. And yet both of the aforementioned individuals are pretty prominent and well to do and so neither would have the slightest problem moving into any neighborhood or joining any social club they desired to. So their skin color doesn't really seem to have any importance there.  And it can't be wealth either. To be sure there are lots of poor "people of color", but lots of rich and famous ones too.

 

Maybe genetics is what really counts. Look at Barack Obama, for example. He's just as much white as he is black, but he's said to be our first black president. So, it looks like if one of your ancestors was black, then you're black. It's kind of like in ante-bellum New Orleans, where they labeled people as quadroons and even octoroons, so if even one of your great-grandparents was black, then that settled it. You were black. You'd think we'd want to get out of that box by this time. Maybe we should be more like Tiger Woods, whom the sports writers have criticized because he insisted on seeing himself more as a really great golfer than a black symbol. He calls himself a Cablinasian (which stands for Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian). Makes sense to me.

 

But wait a minute. What about conservative high achievers like Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell and Ben Carson. They get reviled, called Uncle Toms, and worse. Despite their pigmentation they don't seem to count. I guess to be in the "people of color" category, the real color you have to be is blue rather than red.

 

If you ask me I think we should just start over and do what Martin Luther King wanted. Just forget the color and judge people by their character.