Black Lives Matter: "I Don't See Color"

I see two kids and a RED boat. What else do you notice about this photo?

1. It Was the Milkman

I am one of four siblings. Three girls with blonde hair and one red-headed boy. Not strawberry-red hair, not carrot-red hair, but fire engine red hair.

When we were out and about as a family, we were constantly stopped by complete strangers.

"Where did you get that RED HAIR?" people would exclaim. My mother would use the old, "It was the milkman" line, which was funny, because we really did have a milkman -- wow I'm old -- and he really did have red hair.

One time a girl about my brother's age, then five or six, pointed to him and said, "I like him. He has red hair." And then she blushed and hid behind her mother. We had never seen them before and we never saw them again.

I am tired of hearing, "I don't see color."

If people can pick out red hair from a mile away, they sure as heck see skin color.

If one of the first things you notice about someone is his or her gender, you sure as heck see their skin color too.

I have a brown-skinned child. I see his color every day. I see it in its delicious milk chocolate tone that makes me want to eat him up. I see it darken the minute it warms up enough for him to start playing outside in shorts and a T-shirt even with SPF 50 sunscreen applied twice a day. It's how I pick him out on the lacrosse field where all the kids are so padded and helmeted up that it's almost impossible to tell your child from any other. I look for the spindly brown legs.

Don't tell me you don't see color. I'm not buying it. I've lived it.

2. The Shopping Trip

About 15 years ago, I asked my then boss to go with me to the mall over the lunch hour to help me pick out a tie for my then husband. If you ever saw this man, you would understand why -- when he would show off a new addition to his wardrobe -- I would start singing "You're too sexy for your shirt" to mock him for caring so much about whether or not he was stylish. But I have to say, he is GQ to the hilt. He has a closetful of shoes that would rival that of Imelda Marcos. He can't pass a shoe store without drooling. There's a picture of him on FaceBook kissing a pair of shoes he saw in a store in New York City. His ties are gorgeous. He has impeccable taste. Oh, and he's African-American.

Shopping is a passion of his, so he was more than happy to oblige. We entered the department store, two well-dressed professionals. I realized almost immediately that I had just entered another world. I have never felt so many eyes on me. Everyone in that store assumed we were a couple. A mixed race couple. We weren't followed or harassed -- I assume my white skin bought us some privilege there -- but we got long looks from everyone who saw us.

I had my eyes opened quite wide that day. I was startled that people jumped to the conclusion we were a couple and I was annoyed they were giving us the disapproving once over -- over and over again. If my significant other was black, what concern was it to any of them? I just sailed along and let them think whatever they wanted to think. What was the alternative -- to wear a sign saying, "He's not my husband; he's my boss and he's just helping me pick out a tie?"

Don't tell me you don't see color. I'm not buying it. I've lived it.

3. Ferengi!

When we adopted T, we traveled into the far reaches of Sidama, in the southern region of Ethiopia, to meet with his uncle. Sidama is very rural and remote. Two hours each way were on dirt roads that got narrower and bumpier the further we drove. We even had the quintessential African experience of driving through a stream as opposed to crossing it over a bridge. It's likely that it's impassable during the rainy season.

We were five white people and three Ethiopians crammed into a Toyota four wheel drive SUV. It was the Feast of St. Mary Day. We kept encountering groups of celebrants in the villages we passed through. And then we got to what was clearly one of the larger villages. The road was completely blocked by a procession of people coming back from church services. Our vehicle became a tiny island in a sea of brown faces. Faces of brown men who were pressing up against the windows and peering in at the "ferengi" -- white foreigners. Brown hands that were trying to open the doors to the SUV. Our driver got out, locked us in and kept pushing the men away, pushing them to keep walking. Apparently a lot of drinking takes place among the young men, who then lead the procession -- probably because the priests would not approve of their drunkeness, and the priests bring up the rear of the procession. Once the demographics changed to more women and children, that meant the priests were not far behind, and the men who were swarming our vehicle melted away.

When we got to our children's village, I felt like we had just entered Oz with Glenda singing, "Come out, come out, wherever you are." People came out of nowhere, first a few, then a few more, then a lot more, and then a whole lot more. From a tiny village with three buildings, we were surrounded by a hundred or more Ethiopians who rarely, if ever, see a white person. T tells me he never once saw a white person until he was in the Big House. The villagers talked, pointed, giggled. The men pressed forward. One grabbed a switch and held them at bay. The children were afraid of us, until one screwed up the courage to do a fist bump with me. Then one by one they tentatively touched their fist to mine and made the fireworks gesture and sound. They laughed and laughed and kept coming back for more. It wasn't just that we were strangers. We were white strangers.

On our way back, we stopped in Arbegona, the major town of the eponymous district within Sidama, to drop off the two Ethiopian officials who had accompanied us to translate. We got there just as school let out. Scores of children in their blue uniforms were walking in small groups down the road. I opened the door and Hubs and I got out just as two boys, maybe 10 years old or so, were walking by. They stopped. Their eyes flew open. They gasped in excitement.

"FERENGI?" they exclaimed.

I laughed. "Yes, we're ferengi."

"Do you speak English?" one asked, clearly eager to practice his probably dull lessons on real English speaking people.

"Yes, I speak English. Do you study English?"

"Yes we learn English in school."

"Well, you are doing very well."

Then the money came out to pay the translators and we were mobbed again by people hoping we might give some to them too, and that precious moment was over.

Don't tell me you don't see color. I'm not buying it. I've lived it.

4. Summer Camp

Growing up, we spent all summer running through the fields and woods, hiking hills, and wading the stream across the street from our house. But my mother still believed we needed a week at camp. I'm sure it was her "get out of jail free" card in what was otherwise a long summer with a house full of kids.

So off we went to Camp Stevenson on Ononta Lake in the Massachusetts Berkshires where we did the usual camp stuff -- arts and crafts, row boating and canoeing, archery, singing camp songs, and taking swimming lessons.

The dreaded swimming lessons. We swam in a frog pond. Okay, it was an old farm pond. But the water was black and you could only imagine the slimy creatures who lived in there. You couldn't see the bottom once you got in past your knees, and my knees were slightly lower to the ground back then. They had a buddy system. You were assigned a buddy and they blew a whistle every ten minutes or so and you had to grab your buddy's hand and hold it up in the air. If a buddy was missing, that was the camp's signal that it was time to pull everyone out of the water and start dragging the pond. Because seriously, you would never see a person on the bottom of that ugly body of water.

One time a black girl and I were assigned to be buddies. Back story: I grew up in a white neighborhood and went to an all white school and shopped in stores that the white people who lived in the white neighborhood shopped in, and went to a very liberal but all-white church. I was seven years old and I had never touched brown skin.

I was afraid to hold the black girl's hand. I was afraid that she would feel weird. I knew those were terrible things to be thinking, but I thought them. And her skin texture was different. Drier. If I'd been exposed to people of color on a regular basis, I would not have been standing there dreading every time the whistle blew that I would have to hold this poor girl's hand, and I would not have been feeling really really horrible about myself for not wanting to touch this girl on the basis of the color of her skin. She and her sister were the only two black girls at camp, and I could see the sadness and loneliness in their eyes. I was acutely aware that they were two black faces who felt alone in a sea of white, and they were acutely aware of their color difference from the rest of us as well.

Don't tell me that you don't see color. I'm not buying it. I've lived it.



Seeing color does not make you a racist. It makes you human. Shocker -- even black people see skin color. I watched a nanny at the Big House kissing an especially dark baby and telling him he was beautiful, the color of dark chocolate.

Tell me that you see color, but it doesn't matter to you. Tell me that you see color, but you also see a mom or a son or a kind nurse or a gifted musician. There's nothing racist about seeing color, just as there's nothing sexist about seeing male and female or hair-ist about seeing blonde vs. red vs. bald.

Please, stop trying to convince me of your non-racism by telling me you don't see color. Make peace with the fact that you do see color. Only then will you be able to fully understand how color makes as much difference in a person's experience in our society as whether one is male or female.

Color exists. And black lives matter. And don't start on me with the "all lives matter" retort. If black lives mattered in this society as much as white lives, there wouldn't need to be a Black Lives Matter movement. But when we see a black child get mowed down in the blink of an eye by police gunfire in an open-carry state for the audacity of holding a toy gun, we have to admit we do see color and the seeing of it is more lethal for black Americans than for white.

I do not believe anyone who looks at this photo and doesn't see 

a fair skinned girl and a brown skinned boy.