I happened to catch the tail end of the news the other day and caught a snippet about another one of our elected leaders, representative Eli Crane of Arizona, accidentally speaking their truths. During an address to his constituents on the House floor he referred to black folks as ‘colored people’. Surprisingly my initial thoughts weren’t rooted in anger or offense, more around logic and understanding. The first thing I thought was, color is a beautiful thing. It’s one of the things that makes our visual lives so fascinating. Should I be offended? It actually somewhat makes sense to me, WITH one small caveat. The caveat is that the person making the statement, or referencing a person of color in that way, if they are not a person of color, must be open to being referenced along the same spectrum, so, in essence, without color or colorless. How else would you describe a white person if a black person is definitively described as colored? The only logical conclusion that I can come up with was ‘colorless’, or something along those lines. The entire concept of ‘colored people’ reminds me of an activity that my father had me do one day after I asked him what color God was. He had me grab my big crayon box, the one with more than 60 crayons and the sharpener on the back, and two pieces of paper. He asked me to color a circle in the middle of each piece of paper, the first of which included using all of the colors in the box, and the second just a circle with the white crayon. When I was done I once again approached my father with the same question. I wanted to know what color God was. He asked me how many colors were in the circle that appeared black, and I responded that it included all of the colors in the box. He then asked me how many colors were in the white circle and I responded that there was just the one. The next thing he said was instantaneously rooted into my developing psyche. He said that he didn’t know what color God was but that black, as I learned from our experiment, was the inclusion of all colors, and white was, literally, the absence of color. That’s all I needed to know. It was then that I started to truly understand the underpinnings of my existence into the world I was born into. So, in conclusion - and I’m only speaking for myself - I’m OK with being referred to as colored as long as I am able to reference those that are absent color, or colorless, in the same manner.
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