I Speak in Colors
I’m neither white nor black, I’m brown. And I often talk about brown people. In fact, when I’m with brown people I talk about us as collective brown people, and when I’m not with brown people, I feel the need to elaborate on the humorous things about brown people which make us special and the cultural things that make us unique. As a huge fan of Bollywood, I also love to educate people on brown music and demonstrate brown dancing, slightly, by doing the famous ‘pet the dog screw the lightbulb’ move. Brown people never mind when I say things about brown people, because they get it. Strangely enough a group of white people were offended when I once used the term ‘brown’, and I didn’t get that because as a brown person , I hold the right to call myself and my people brown. Living in white America, the black and the brown and the white discourse always come about. Somehow I’m comfortable with speaking in colors. Because it gets the point across. White people are one thing. Black people are one thing. Brown people are one thing. There are other colors too of course, but for now I’m just sticking to these three. The point is, the colors convey somewhat of a collective similarity in each group.
I am so used to talking about people in colors that I fail to realize how brainwashed I am with the fake man made construct of race, living in America. How the construct of race and color defines identity and the living experience of daily life in America. How absolutely unnatural and absurd it is to define your living experience using the colored boundaries. I didn’t realize how unnatural and absurd speaking, thinking, and living in color was until coming to Palestine and having to look at my closest Palestinian friend in the eye, to struggle coming up with answers to her simple questions “What’s with the colors? Why do you talk about people in colors? It’s so weird”.
“What color am I?” she asked. I am about to answer “brown” when I see the look on her face that tells me, that it's a rhetorical question with no sensible answer. One of her sisters has blonde hair. What color is she?
I think about my students. Pierre, one of my 4th graders, is a white freckled kid with bright red hair. Palestinian. When I look at him through my American eyes, and think about my perspectives shaped by the exposures in America, nothing about Pierre says “Arab”. If I saw him in America, I’d classify him as a white kid. Yara, one of my 5th graders, is a student of mine who some teachers say looks like she could be my daughter. Her skin tone and mine are the same and she’s got similar facial features. She looks brown. Again, fully Palestinian. If I saw her in America, I’d classify her as brown and Indian.
In Jericho, there are dark skinned Arabs who are “black” by my American lenses. As I think about my friend’s quizzical question, and her smirk and slight distaste with my speech, especially coming from me, from the land of the free, home of the brave, so called “melting pot” United States of America, where supposedly diversity and culture is focal, I struggle to make sense of my mental frames. And as I reflect on her question “Why do you speak in colors?” the only answer I can come up with is “How can I not?”. An Asian American’s experience in America is different from a European American’s experience, which is also worlds apart from Black Americans. I try to tell her that race is something in America that is definitive. Every application, every survey, every census will ask you about your race. As young, educated, minority students or young professionals in America, we feel more inclined to talk about race, to get it out on the open, to feel empowered by our colors or backgrounds or experiences in America to voice those narratives.
The first time I ever saw a black person was when I moved to the States at the age of nine. I went to an inner city Brooklyn school, P.S. 152, and there were maybe 3 other students my color and the whole school thought we were related. Most kids were black. And I remember distinctly my mother telling me to not play with the black kids. As a kid, I didn’t understand, because I would think but I’m not white either. I’m neither white nor black. And people always seemed to talk about the white kids and the black kids. Cafeterias would also always be white or black. So when I finally identified myself as ‘brown’ and finally attended a high school with a significant number of ‘brown’ kids, and found my first ‘brown’ best friend, it was ownership of my minority experience that I had not gotten before. In a strange way, it took a long time to identify myself as brown American. Brown meant , people like me. and American meant white, people not like me. It took years to reach the point of being comfortable in the color of my skin, my culture and race, and my national citizenship.
Suddenly all those discussions with friends, programming and coordinating and sessions of different 'diversity' programs and ‘progressing’ in dialogue about race, and color, and racism and stereotypes in college as a young activist, seem so silly that I feel embarrassed as an American. Because none of that should actually matter.
As I reflect on my friend’s question, I start thinking, why do we focus so much on color and race? How truly strange it is that, that fake construct of our identity means so much. The experiences that we have in our skins is not fake, but the construct of it is very much an intangible and baseless construct. In Palestine, everyone is Palestinian. Some are light complexioned, others dark, and most filling the whole spectrum of skin colors. There are comical stereotypes about the villager or the “falaheen” accent, or the stubbornness of people from Hebron, or the people from Nablus who love to gossip, or people from the north who are extremely conservative. But no one here talks about color. Everyone is Palestinian.
I wonder if we can ever reach that point in America. And I understand that quiet smirk in my friends voice and eyes as I hope for America by looking at the example of people living in Palestine.
Thoughts?
