As a kid attending Catholic School I can never recall a class where we studied and defined the mythical races of mankind. I knew I was a member of the black race. Nobody had to tell me that, after all, this is America. I knew there was a white race because it was ever present in my existence. Being born and raised in the Los Angeles area I knew there were Mexicans but I was never sure what race they belonged to. Through movies and television I was aware that there were Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans but I wasn’t sure what race they belonged to either. They were Orientals. What is that? It’s not a color. Then there were Indians, the people who were here before the Pilgrims arrived. They were called Indians but they had nothing to do with India. The same for people living in the Amazon rainforest. Were they the same race as the people in the Southwest United States who lived in adobe houses? Then there were the Eskimos, what were they? I am not sure when I became aware of Arabs. Even though they were the people who inhabited the lands where all the stories of the bible took place I can’t recall the word Arab being used in any of my many years of religious classes. I think I became aware of Arabs when the so called oil shortage happened in the mid 70’s. I probably knew what OPEC was before I knew what an Arab was.
I was aware of the color and race terms that were applied to some of these people. The Indians were the “red” people. The Chinese and Japanese were the “yellow” people. The terms red and yellow weren’t used in the textbooks but black and white were used all the time to describe race. As a kid in elementary school it was not something I questioned or thought about a lot. I had other things on my mind, like, what color shoe strings I should get for my powder blue Converse or if I had enough coin to see the latest Bruce Lee flick at the Cinema 21. In our house there were two sets of encyclopedias on the bookshelf, both published by Grolier. One was about science and the other was about the countries of the world. I was equally obsessed with both. I would spend hours, mostly looking at the pictures. Even though I was reading them in the 70’s the books were published in the early 60’s and reflected a 50’s vision of the world and science. The science books were populated with black and white photos of jet planes and cut away drawings of rocket engines which was very fascinating for the boy in me. The countries books had vivid color photos. I was particularly interested in the photos of Europe, that far away place where the other white people lived. There was a Disneyesque quality to them. Everything looked perfect and beautiful. There are two photos I remember to this day. One was an aerial shot of the Tower Bridge in London looking majestic and timeless and the other was a photo of a huge bed of tulips in the middle of Amsterdam with its fairy tale houses and old white haired people riding bicycles looking so serene and at peace with themselves. Why would white people leave this paradise? Later in life, in high school, I would learn of the devastating history of Europe from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages to the two World Wars and the Holocaust.
I knew the United States was a place of turmoil. Even in my uninformed and clueless life as a child I was still aware of the conflicts happening in the world of adults even though I didn’t know what it all signified. I vaguely remember the Watts Uprising. I vividly remember Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy being assassinated, the Vietnam war and the college students getting shot for protesting, Nixon getting busted for Watergate (didn’t know what Watergate was), the Black Panthers roaming the streets with guns and really cool afros, the Manson murders, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and watching (on TV) the SLA house burn after the shootout with the LA cops. It seemed that the United States was at war at home and abroad and I saw a lot of black faces involved so at some level I was aware that being black in America wasn’t just some kind of ordinary existence. It seemed that where ever we were, trouble would not be far. As I became older and more worldly I became curious of the other “races” in the world. In my limited world view I did not see the same things happening to other races that had happened and were happening to black people. I learned more about the Atlantic Slave trade, I learned about Jim Crowe, the Klu Klux Klan, lynchings, and the Civil Rights Movement. As a teenage Catholic I started to question if there was a God. If God did exist what was his plan for us? Why did he allow slavery to happen? Why did he let the indigenous people of America lose their lives, land, and heritage? Why did he let all those Jewish people get sent to the ovens and gas chambers in Europe? Why did he let the Japanese people get slaughtered by atomic bombs? As a fledgling man I realized it was not God that let these things happen it was man who let these things happen and much of the justification was based on racial classification.
Wherever in the world where people are classified, labeled, and imaginary boundaries of nations are drawn and different gods worshipped there will be the “other” and wherever you find the “other” you will find atrocities. Have we not had enough? Is it time to redefine race to what it originally was and has always been? We are one race. We are all humans. We are all brothers and sisters. We may speak in different tongues, me may wear different clothing and eat different foods but we all start life the same, as little helpless babies and we will all die the same, without breath and heart beat. That’s the law of nature, life and death, everything in between is up to us.
I belong to no race or no time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feelings about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
Zora Neal Hurston
How it Feels to Be Colored (1928)
