There Are No White People
A Counter-Spell
by Nathaniel Hellerstein
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 then liberate you; for the truth shall set you free, but first it’ll hurt.
Therefore this essay is absurdly 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 absurdly literal-minded; so by “white”, I mean the same color as clouds, paper, snow, cotton, milk, and bone. 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 privilege 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. That light warm shade of brown deserves its own name. I propose “caucasian”, spelled with a small c.
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 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?
