WTF Series, #2 - Pigment Not Race

Are ‘White’ people white?  Are ‘Black’ people black?

Actually not usually.  These are social constructs based on racism.  First remember this biological fact:

1.     There is only one ‘race’ – the human race.  Look it up.

There is no such thing as ‘multi-racial’ or a need to check a box that asks, “What race are you?”  ‘Bi-racial,’ ‘mixed race,’ ‘interracial,’ ‘the races’ and every other word or phrase that implies there are multiple races are bogus.  These commonly used words by the U.S. government, corporate HR offices, universities, the bourgeois media and even diversity liberals and ‘leftists’ just enforce racism. It was the colonial race theorists of the 1600s that insisted on there being different biological races, with different intellectual inheritances, so as to justify settlement and oppression.  The whole thing was based on bad science.  Even the Irish were a 'race.'

Makeup World

What we are left with visually are skin colors and some physical variations of faces, body types and height – basically trivial things given the real variations that could exist in DNA.  These latter physical variations re noses, height, hair, etc. also exist within different skin shades as we know. Skin shades are based on protecting the body from skin cancer in Equatorial and sunny climates, so it’s more of a geographic indicator than anything else.  Which is why the racists like to codify it and the class system likes to institutionalize it as they are geographic racists.

So are ‘white’ people really white?  Well no. Check ‘em out next time you look at one. As an example, Johnny Winter was an albino blues-rock guitar player from Texas with long white hair.  He maybe qualified as ‘white skinned’ but most ‘white’ people are not albinos. Then there are those scary white girls with ‘porcelain’ skin, who are still not really white.  Pale-faces, maybe…? So-called white people are actually mostly cream colored, beigy or light brown, sometimes badly tanned, many times pinkish or reddish when they get sun, a sunburn or drink too much, but they ARE NOT WHITE.

We are not including mimes, of course.  They are white.

So are all ‘black’ people really black?  Well not usually.  Most of the time so-called black people in the U.S. are various shades of brown, from very light to very dark.  This is no secret.  Yet Barack Obama was always called ‘black.’  He wasn’t – partly because his mother was not a Kenyan.  Are we now using the ‘50% or below’ rule to define people?  Is that a big improvement over the racist ‘1% drop of blood’ rule that was used by Jim Crow?  Same with Kamala Harris, whose parents are Indian and Jamaican.  She is already being called ‘black.’  She’s not, she’s light brown.  Look at her!  Call her ‘light brown’ if you must. Again, the 50% or below rule!

Unless you are an upper-middle class Catholic kid from Covington High School in Tennessee who wears blackface to your high school basketball game.  Then you’re black.

If you’ve noticed, Asians are not ‘yellow’ either. Where the fuck did the ‘yellow peril’ shit come from? Many Japanese or Koreans have lightly colored skin, and unless they have jaundice or are exceptionally sallow, they are not ‘yellow.’ That Japanese Marie Kondo woman could be your little ‘white’ mother!  Down towards the equator in the Philippines people get darker, and for good reason.  “East” Asians from Pakistan, India or Bangladesh are various shades of brown, to the point where some even look ‘black.’  Melanin is what it is called.

MAC Makeup for the color-challenged

Nor are native Americans ‘red.’ After all, I think ‘redskin’ comes from the bloody mess left when native American heads were first scalped by Europeans. (Thank you Washington NFL team for reminding us of that…) Or the sunburned Scots-Irish cowboys... they're the original redskins!  Indigenous peoples are varieties of brown, getting darker in Navajo or Apache country in the southwest U.S., which makes sense.

Latinos are also various shades of brown from light to very dark, given the history of slavery and colonial rule over the indigenous in Latin America.  Some Latinos in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia or Argentina – even Puerto Rico - are virtually 'light,' especially those closest to Spanish or Portuguese origins.  This is because their families did not intermarry with various indigenous, slave or Latino-African people in Latin or Central America or the Caribbean.

The issue of parents or children with different ethnic or skin tone backgrounds doesn’t fit into the present ‘classification’ system either.  There are millions. Given the increased migration, transfers and mingling of peoples for years now all over the world, this 'race system' has been outmoded since it began. There is no box to check for all the variations!

Only a portrait painter or a makeup artist needs to keep track of these subtle and detailed variations in skin tones.  I’m sure they have better names for all the subtleties.  But now we have to too!  This whole racial, color-coding thing is really a SOCIAL and economic construct, a box if you will, a trap actually.  It is all bullshit.  

I'm going to use the term 'colorism' more - especially since the CRT hysteria over how 'the races' are treated.  The Guardian on skin shade 'colorism':  https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/08/colorism-series-editors-note-why-we-asked-black-women-taboo

The Cultured Marxist

Mediterranean complexion?

Athens, Georgia

February 4, 2019