COLOR ME BEIGE  –  by Alexa

POC (People of Color) is PC (Politically Correct) but colored? Not so much. Colored pencils, colored people. That’s what I grew up hearing. The Spanish word for ‘black,’ Negro, sounds too harsh. And the English word, ‘black,’ is a lie, I silently protest – almost no one is truly ‘black.’  ‘Brown’ makes more sense.

Silly too is ‘white.’ Albinos are ‘white,’ and very unlucky if born in Africa; I heard there is trade in albino body parts. 

We, the descendants of imperialist thieves, are flesh-colored.

Check your Crayola box!

“That’s white of you,” I read in the New Yorker. I checked the date. Sure enough, it was an issue of nuggets from the past.

The implication of this compliment is that treatment from a non-white would be duplicitous, deceitful, amoral.

In my day, most names had no faces. Everyone knew what Einstein, Eisenhower and Washington looked like, but who could distinguish Shostakovich from Prokofieff? Schumann from Schubert?

I think I can detect race in the sound of a voice. Yet I was astonished to learn that Johnny Mathis was not Caucasian, nor Stevc Curwood, the mellifluous host of NPR’s “Living on Earth.” 

My father warned me not to get involved with a person of color. You might forget the racial difference, he told me, but the other person, the minority, never would or could.

Recently I saw the unseen, the support staff of the military base where I grew up, dark gleaming faces in the background of snapshots from childhood. Colored troops on Army bases.

Just noticed!

Black Lives Matter. Public display of this sentiment on a wearable button led to an acquaintance, a friendship, and a business deal with a woman who gave herself a middle name on social media, “Borndisway.” She is dark, and bright. What courteous deference motivates her to preface “Miss” before our first names when she addresses us?

Sure, we have a racist bone in our body – let’s not kid ourselves. White privilege is unconscious and subconscious. We are the standard. This land is our land!

I knew who I was as I felt a stab of disappointment at a summer picnic of the Ethical Society, when I saw the single black family in the congregation had joined the party. Was it because the daughter was aloof, and not ingratiating?

I am raising hackles now, engendering bad feelings, it’s just words on paper but there you are. My sister once commented that mixed race offspring are beautiful. Another fraught thought. Mixing races can be seen as improvement, in a lessening of more African features when crossed with Caucasian. As time passes, the homogeneity of our species will increase with intermarriage of the many different pedigrees walking the earth today.

I saw a documentary about Korean-Americans, war orphans adopted by Americans, who don’t feel truly at home either in Korea or the United States. Korean-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Native-Americans, I just learned a new word to describe myself; Euro-American. 

To Alexa Abercrombie Ross:  Thanks for letting me post this! Nan