People of Colour
We are all people of colour.
We are all people.
These divides, skin tone, or sex, they are concepts I have a hard time wrapping my head around. I see it, I understand the way things are, but what I fail to understand is how it ever got this way and why it continues to be this way.
Imagine a world where people with big noses were a maligned or oppressed group. Or green eyes. Or anyone under 5 feet tall, or maybe over 6 feet tall. Where privilege was based on your hip to waist ratio. People all look different, and I'm a fair shade of beige, I have some melanin. What if we'd waited, as a species, to leave warmer climates and had not changed to suit our environments in the way that we did, and being paler made you the oddball, rather than being darker. What if the way our long-distant ancestors bred wasn't done in precisely the way that it was. Then I'd be the one oppressed, all because of something so arbitrary as how much melanin I needed in my skin to protect me from the sun and still manage that delicate balance where I'd get enough vitamin D.
I see culture, and I understand it. I understand how cultural differences can cause conflict. The culture of religion is the biggest one, another idea I find it hard to wrap my head around, the same science that tells me that the only difference between me and Bob Marley or Barack Obama or Ghandi are evolutionary traits meant to adapt us to our particular environments (and that before the great emigration from Africa, no one who looked like me existed), tells me that there not very likely a dude in robes and a long beard sitting on a cloud dictating to humans about how they ought to behave and what will happen after they die if they don't. Some of these cultural differences are ones I find very disturbing, but I have to acknowledge they only are because my life and society is very different. I see women oppressed in serious ways in many Islamic countries, Christianity isn't all that far behind to be honest. All Muslims? All Christians? No, but enough to be alarming. Can I accept it carte blanche as "diversity"? Not really. No, I can't accept that women are not allowed to learn, or drive, or reveal the skin on their arms or legs even in stifling heat, but I do accept that some of them believe that's what they're supposed to do, to the point that they believe it's what they want to do. After all, who am I to suggest what someone should believe? Yet, it does directly oppose what I believe. And that's a conflict I find personally difficult to resolve within my own thinking.
To me, people come in all shades, shapes and sizes, there is no line to me where one kind of person starts or ends. I have a hard time calling them anything but "people" with no qualifiers and I wouldn't separate someone from me because their nose size crosses a particular line, so why would I for something like the shade of their skin?
It's not different from my arguments about sex, and I say sex, because the construct of gender also annoys me. Express yourself however you like, wear a dress if you have a penis, play hockey if you don't - sex does in fact present quite stark physical differences, but even at that, there are many that are close to the lines on both sides. I play (relatively competitive) hockey with other females, because males on average are larger, stronger, and have a very different centre of gravity, and in competition, I like some measure of fairness that body types dictated by sex interferes with. Gender is irrelevant though, it's nothing but another categorization to divide people for no good reason at all.
These divides are what I'd like to see eliminated, but in the aim toward equality, these labels are solidified, not diminished and it really feels to me like we're going in the opposite direction. That the more we focus on differences, the less chance we'll ever have of equality. And sure, society gets that too, so we focus instead on diversity. Yet, the second that one person's beliefs contradict another's set of beliefs, we're back in the same boiling pot and we can't clearly see what is ok and what is not ok, like I can't see why it's ok for someone to not have the freedom to choose, why Islamic women can't ditch their hijabs and long sleeved shirts because it's 90° in the shade, because they fear the wrath of God, or men, which really in my mind equates to exactly the same thing.
So I consign to live my moral right - which is that we're all people of colour, we're all people, and the variances between us based solely on what we look like have no bearing on hearts and minds, and those are the things that matter, and the things I refuse to categorize. Some are going to work with my set of beliefs and others are not, and that's ok - we all have to fight for our own rights, and make the decision to do that. I've had success, but I didn't do it, I never directly fought for the right to play hockey, but from being a child told it was for boys, to being a woman who spends every Thursday night playing, I appreciate the efforts of those who did. The point is that things do change, how I'd like to see them change is reflected in my thoughts and feelings, that what we look like doesn't matter, it doesn't make us different - the way society treats us based on those things is what makes us different.