The color of a person's skin, when thought of from a purely objective and logical viewpoint, is the most superficial aspects of humanity. While some things can be guessed about a person's heritage based upon skin color, such as whether or not someone has African, Native American, or Middle Eastern blood flowing through their veins, it tells nothing about one's upbringing, one's intelligence, one's education, one's social or economic standing, one's occupation, or moral code. And yet people have been enslaved, judged, and murdered merely based on the fact that they were unfortunate enough to be blessed with more melanin than their paler counterparts.
The subject of race has been, for whatever reason, a recurring theme swirling around me this week, as if begging me to dive into it head on. On one mailing list I belong to, we've been discussing how race affects the Science Fiction and Fantasy areas of the publishing industry. It is an uphill battle for Black authors to get SF books published with predominantly Black characters, and if they do, they are unilaterally relegated to the African American section of bookstores, as if the stories an author of color tells would only be interesting to people of the same flesh tone.
Also, the ongoing stream of garbage being flung at Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is getting to a point where it's so offensive that it borders on absurd. From the recent cover of The New Yorker depicting Senator Obama as a Muslim giving his militaristic-clad wife a fist bump, to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, of all people, making the ridiculous accusation during a commercial break of a Fox Network interview that Obama was "talking down" to Black people and his wanting to "cut his nuts off" for it, it's evident that even within the community of those with never-fading tans, that skin color is a barrier to acceptance and understanding among us all.
I could go on ad nauseum about my theories on where this comes from. I do believe that the ideals of self worth, or the need to lift up one's own feeling of self worth by finding ways to devalue others, is a major part of it. But I'm sure that is far too simplistic to be the sole cause for such a mutual and widespread societal plague. And although we can so dispassionately judge each other for such superficial reasons, the topic itself is so personal that even the attempt to discuss it evokes controversy and ire.
Although I in my fiction I don't write to deliver messages or forward particular agendas, I do deal with "life-issues" such as race and racism. For example, in my short story collection Phoenix Tales: Stories of Death & Life, there is a story entitled "A Tale of Black and White" in which two old men return to the scene of a horrible incident that took place 60 years ago, in which Jesse Black (a White man), took part in the lynching of the son of his companion, Amos White (who happens to be a Black man) after his relationship with Black's daughter results in her death. The irony of the story, and I think the heart of it as well, is that these two men have a deeply rooted hatred toward one another that neither has, nor will ever, get beyond. And yet because of their mutual tragedy they share a bond so strong that it soon becomes obvious that all they have left to cling to in this life is each other.
I don't understand how one human being can look at another and so easily distance themselves from that person that they literally dehumanize them in their minds. How can the cries of a person being chained, whipped, or hung from a tree not resonate in the soul of the one responsible and remind him of his own family and the horrific devastation such an act to their own loved ones would inflict upon them? Why is it that it merely takes the different color of a human's flesh to cause one human being to view another as something both alien and of lesser worth? Just the very thought that we humans have the capacity to do such things saddens and frightens me, and at the end of the day, there is no horror I could write that is more terrifying than those that people inflict upon one another on a daily basis, and it's probably why human nature is usually at the core of all of my stories in some shape or form. To paraphrase the question asked by Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View this morning when discussing the revelation that Reverend Jesse Jackson used the word "nigger" during the same interview mentioned above:
When are we going to get past this racial divide and move on to more important things that affect all of us?
I think the below words from the song "Skin I'm In" by the group Cameo best describe how I feel (Lyrics taken from sing365.com):
It's the world who's out to see
Basic respect humanity
I'm just trying to be for real in a world with less appeal
I'm so frustrated and flustered
At what has been reduced to justice
It is immoral or a sin
If it is according to the skin I'm in
Skin I'm in
- GBB
Comments