There Are No White People
A Counter-Spell
At First Sight
This essay is an attempt to see with my own eyes, rather
than with other people’s lies. Seeing as you are told to see is socially
convenient, but it is illusion, which leads to suffering. Seeing with your own
eyes will make you suffer right away, but only from mental exertion.
Therefore this essay is idiotically literal-minded. In it,
I pay close attention to a trivial visual detail. My aim is optical precision.
I do so out of respect for reality. The philosopher Voltaire said that those who
can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. This essay is
an attack on one of those absurdities.
Fifty Shades Of Brown
The
atrocious absurdity mocked here is belief in the existence of white people. For
have you ever actually seen a white
person?
Before
you answer, please remember that this essay is idiotically literal-minded; so
by “white”, I mean the same color as clouds, paper, snow, cotton, and milk. By
‘white’ I mean white.
By
this optically-precise standard, I am confident that your skin is not white. If
you put your hand on a sheet of blank white paper, then it will stand out, for
your hand and the paper are not the same color.
I
am also confident that if you investigate further, as I have, then you will see
that there are no white people, anywhere. There are plenty of people called white, but that is a misnomer.
Viewed
with scientific objectivity, people of European ancestry have a skin with a
complex tint. It contains bright red from arterial blood, blue from veins,
yellow from subcutaneous fat, and brown from melanin. The color is definitely
not white; but what to name it?
This
chromatic question so perplexed me that I sought help from an artist. So I
visited Katherine McKay, several of whose luminously beautiful paintings I now
have the honor to own. I pointed to the back of my left hand and asked, “What
color is this?”
Her
answer: “A light warm shade of brown.”
Brown!
Just the right word. I have since seen, with my own eyes, that normal human
skin varies from dark brown to light brown; teak to bamboo. If you wrote with
ink the color of Louis Farrakhan on paper the color of Patrick Buchanan, then
you’d have to squint to read what you wrote; for they’re both shades of the
same color: brown.
It’s
true that there is some variation away from normal brown. There are albinos,
who are pink. Some people are blue, due to blood defects or overuse of
silver-based medicines. There are even orange people, such as John Boehner and
Donald Trump. But these rare exceptions are neither white, nor a ‘race’.
Not
only is ‘race’ a genetic exaggeration, it isn’t even about skin color. It’s about skin tint.
And
just how much respect does white racial supremacism deserve, given that race is
bogus, supremacy is lawless, and white people don’t even exist?
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