Race, the Son of Racism

Me and my friends used to play this game when we were little. We would go around and ask each other how they would describe color to a blind person, or someone who’s never seen color before. A seemingly simple task but when attempted, near impossible. Try describing blue. It’s the color of the sky, it’s light, or dark, it’s kinda like green but also purple. I don’t think this description would help a blind person in the slightest. But what even is color? How do you really define it? Well a quick Google search will lead you to dictionary.com where you get the first definition; “the quality of an object or substance with respect to light reflected by the object, usually determined visually by measurement of hue, saturation, and brightness of the reflected light; saturation or chroma; hue.” Shift your eyes down, and you get a second way to use this word; “the natural appearance of the skin, especially of the face; complexion”. Although similar, these definitions mean different things. One deals with things like the rainbow and primary and secondary. While the other deals with the more controversial, skin color. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me speaks a lot of the issue of race and the concept of race as a whole. He says,“race is the child of racism, not the father”. Understanding the way we view this first kind of color helps to more easily how race is a consequence of racism, not the other way around.  

Tech Insider has a video called How Language Changes The Way We See Color where Gavin Evans, a lecturer at Birkbeck University, talks about some of the ideas in his book The Story of Colour, about the culture of color. In this short video, Evans talks about how people from different cultures who speak different languages can distinguish between similar colors more or less easily depending on how they split the colors on the spectrum. 

One of the examples Evans uses is with the colors blue and red. In Russian, there are two words for what we would consider to be different shades of the same color, blue. In Russian, there are separate names for light and dark blue, making them separate colors in the minds of those who refer to them this way. Because of this, they consider them completely different colors, and could easily distinguish between the two of them. 

This is different from how we perceive things in english. When looking at both the light blue and dark blue objects, you immediately think of the same things: having a baby boy, the ocean, the sky, sadness. Although we do this with blue, there is a distinct area where we don’t. Light and dark red, or more popularly known as, pink and red. When looking at pink and red objects, you think much different things. Pink is bubble gum, unicorns, and baby girls, while red means stop, it’s blood, its anger. This is only due to the fact that the english language has created different names, therefore making them different.The language we use has a very strong impact on how we view the world. More specifically, what gets a name. 

Coates views race in a similar way which Evans views colors. Coates speaks a lot in his book about how races were created in order to separate and bring up certain people who wanted power. The variety of labels changed to suppress more people, binding those with lighter skin together by making them one strong entity. Coates says this early in the book, “the new people were something else before they were white- Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish” (7). Before the population truly created “white”, they were many different things. They had different labels that meant different things, but over time, they came together and the variation became limited and all became known as one. This caused what once was different groups of people to become almost indistinguishable from each other. 

Coates reiterates this intentional limitation on variety later in the book, “But a great number of "black" people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead "races" (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights” (115). The number of terms that we use to describe ourselves and others has decreased, and this makes for a much more obvious divide. This clumping of people so enable one “superior” race has had consequences for those who are considered black too. There is a growing of those who consider themselves both black and white while the representation for those people are still obviously lacking. In this world, you are red or pink, not different shades of blue or different points on the color spectrum. When does it switch from white to black?

Evans says ,”Our perception of color is not only related to the colors we see but the words we give colors”. The way we look at color is not only related to the colors we physically see but the words we give to colors. Giving something a different name makes it different. Pink isn’t the same color as red because we say so. There is no reason to give them different names besides  This is the same idea that coates was trying to prove when he said “race is the child of racism, not the father”. The idea of race was only created as a result of certain people wanting to be systematically above others. Therefore, the people above created different names for these people to prove they were different and inferior. Coates is saying that race is not a black and white thing, it’s a spectrum that we’ve made black and white, and Evans tells us it’s our choice what parts of the spectrum we decide to represent.