EPISODE 5 | Playing Against the Paradigm

Race is not a color

[Sounds of violins, reminiscent of a BBC documentary, playing in reverse] 

WALTER MOSLEY: So, I decided that I’d talk to you tonight about a lie. A lie that almost everyone accepts as truth. A belief system that is not questioned, but if it were, the whole world would change, opening a door into a space that might, counterintuitively for many, deliver us from doom.

The connection this talk has to the university is, to me, obvious because almost every school in America perpetuates this lie. And it is only through true investigation and education that we can dispel its foul effects.

This lie can be compressed down into a single word, a color: white. Supposedly, in nature, the composition of all visible light. In political and social reality, however, it is the source of a great blindness. It is my argument that the white race does not exist, has never existed. And the promulgation of any idea of race in the modern world is, consciously or not, the attempt to dominate economically. Which is to say, absolutely.

And so, I begin the talk with a simple question. Who am I? I am an American, from the soles of my feet, to the hair that once adorned my bald head. An American whose dark-hued ancestors were stolen from their lives and cultures and piled into the holds of ships like so many sacks of skin. An American whose Jewish ancestors stowed their lives into the holds of later vessels running from 1000 years of antisemitism that was soon to blossom into Holocaust. An American whose ancestors walked across the frozen waters from Asia to North America discovering a new world, a world that would one day be stolen from their descendants. I am an English-speaking American, whose language is also whispering French from my Louisiana relatives, and sublime Spanish from the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans I rubbed shoulders with growing up in Southern California. A man whose music is the blues that became rock and roll and hip hop, jazz, that is the bastard child and the heir of the unconsecrated coupling between Africa and Europe. 

Who am I? I am a man formed by history but oddly lacking in a clear perspective of the past, a man with so much to me that there is no clear identity to grab onto or to claim. I might be related to Thomas Jefferson, or any of 10,000 masters who raped and, sometimes, even loved their slaves. Who am I? I’m the target of admin and pollsters, census-takers and the evening news. To some, I am the enemy, both inside this nation and internationally, and, to some, I am a brother. I can be at the same time invisible and yet profiled, counted and yet forgotten, imprisoned by circumstance and yet declared free by one of the great documents of political history. I’m prejudged for my skin color, gender, age, education, and even for some things that I’ve actually done wrong. I’m a minor shareholder in the great corporation of America, and therefore responsible for everything good and bad that we’ve done in the name of business. Things we did before I was born, and events that shall occur after I’m gone. I am the amalgamation of all the ignorance, ambitions, yearnings for freedom, and religions of the world. I am, have been, brainwashed so many times that innocence is second nature to me. Contradictorily, America is what I am but not my history, not my identity. I am a new man almost every day. I and mine were once colored, Negro, Black, Afro-American, African-American, brother, sister, Uncle Tom, revolutionary, good one, bad one, convict, malingerer, miracle, and so much more. In the end, I can say with conviction that I am many men, and many Americans. Through my veins runs 10,000 years of history that touches every continent, deity and crime known to humanity.

[Short laughs] This history is not composed of false accounts of the past. It is the blood and the beat and the light that passes through my mind and yours. I am your sibling, whether you know it or not, whether you accept me or not. We, known and unknown to each other, form an identity that I can express but still not know, not completely. And for the state of being, I am infinitely grateful because it means that I can be a part of something greater than the individual while still I am at home in my heart. 

[Laidback, hiphop-ish drumbeat over reversed violins plays]

I am a Black man; this is the truth. This is a lie. This is an oversimplification. This is a confused notion. This is a declaration of war. It defines me, certainly, within the labyrinthine political, economic and social definitions of American culture. I am a Black man but look at me. How can I make such a bold statement without some twist in my voice, some irony? My skin is surely not black, not dark brown, or even medium brown. The only way to see it in this light would be in contact with other colors in the same scheme. “How can you call yourself a Black man?” I’m often asked by people outside the system of American racism. Sometimes they say, “other people surely don’t recognize you as Black.” They think that this is a political statement I’m making, that I’m identifying myself with ancestors that I don’t want to let go of. But this is not true on any level, I don’t have to let go of my culture because it was ripped from the minds of my ancestors by European slavers here and colonized beyond any recognition on the mother continent. I didn’t have to come up with the idea that I’m a black man in America, I just had to walk down the wrong street at twilight, and spying on me from a block away, the police or one of their assistants were happy to stop me and remind me that I have no business in that neighborhood. 

Race is not a color. That’s stupid. Race, as I have said, as I will keep saying, is an economic coding system that, hopefully, has begun to outgrow its relevance through intermarriage, music culture, sports, and the unbelievably slow response to the outcome of the Civil War. Our people, especially the youth, have seen the blurring of lines between the peoples of color: red, white, black or other. 

[Laidback, hiphop-ish drumbeat over reversed violins plays]

People who share oppression of identity in the modern world, at least the modern world that I live in, don’t poke their stick at the corpse of the obvious. But even taking this argument into account, I do not deny that calling me a Black man, me calling myself a Black man, is somehow a travesty. I come to this realization through a slightly circuitous route. That is, one day, I realized that people asking me why I define myself by color rarely or ever ask themselves the same question. I mean, what is a white man? They are pink, tan, olive, ruddy, freckled, milky, chalk-skinned people. They are blond, black-haired, brunette, redheaded. They have every color eye, gray and blue and green. So-called white people have a broad palette of views and features, but in my experience, it’s rare to meet a person who denies his or her whiteness. Why would they? People blame me for perpetuating racism by my self-identification, and, to some degree, this is true. Me accepting the color-coding of the plantation owners and the factory owners and the men who stole the land that they made my ancestors slave on, to a certain degree, me accepting their explanation of my existence maintains their claim to power. But blaming a Black man for his golden chains and earthy hues, his unaccountable ahistorical existence and deep-seated unfathomable rage, is like blaming a hausfrau for global warming because she uses a spray can once a year. She is contributing to the problem, but she is not the cause, not nearly. No, racism, race itself, is not caused by people like me calling themselves what they have been called since they were born, since their great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were born. Racism is born of white people accepting that appellation as fact.

On the day that so-called white people stop recognizing themselves by that terminology, on that day, the linchpin of racism will be pulled out, and the entire prejudicial mechanism of the new world will grind to a halt. And I’m not talking about political correctness here. I’m not saying that all we have to do is stop using certain words like white and Black. No, I am saying that we have to strive for a place where people honestly don’t recognize race as color, dialect, gender, or any other physically manifested feature. The denial of race is not enough. The idea has to be to be disproved and discarded, eradicated from the minds of the responsible, educated, and/or sophisticated member of society.

[Laidback, hiphop-ish drumbeat over reversed violins plays]

Years ago, I imagined in one of my political monographs — by the by, that nobody ever reads — what race was in the eyes of any Black woman, sister, Negro, African-American on these shores. Race for us Black people, sequestered on the isolationist outpost of America, was simple to define and impossible to avoid. Race had a white face. Race was the boss at work, the president and his courts and his congress, radio voices, even Amos and Andy, TV and movie stars, race was the concept of beauty in magazines and on billboards, race was the policeman, and the laws he executed, race was prisons and cotton fields and economic disparity that was presented as a reality that cannot, that should not be denied. Black faces were rarely seen, and when they were, they were barely human. Shiftless, comedic, and most honestly spiteful. 

We had no history, were not a part of history, and could not in any meaningful way contribute to history as it unfolded in the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world. How does one, so oppressed, so isolated, begin to shatter the false notion that has oppressed her more than any physical weapon or law?

One would expect the solution to be akin to the Gordian knot, impossible to break without terrible violence, but no, the answer to the refutation of racial stereotyping is simple. All you have to do is look in the mirror. Isn’t it wonderful to think that your university could be a mirror, you know? It dawned on me one day that any man, woman, or child from any race, when they peered into the looking-glass, all see the same thing. That is, they see the Self. This identity is beyond race, language, gender, and even history. 

When you look in the mirror, race becomes a minor detail within the panoramic vivid image of you. Holding that image in mind and imagining the possibility of that image in the minds of others, we can begin to see how the dictates of racial orientation are superfluous to the roots of identity. White Joe sees Joe in the mirror. Black Jamal sees Jamal in the mirror. Therefore, Joe equals Jamal. |

[Laidback, hiphop-ish drumbeat over reversed violins plays]

America was once a land isolated from its peer nations by vast oceans and the huge expanse of unconquered sky, but no longer. Our science has crushed the world down into a minimum of 24 hours to traverse. It has also transformed history into moments rather than centuries. In Vermont, they used to say, “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” [Distant laugh of an audience member] Today, we say, “if you don’t like the world, give it a day. It’ll get worse.” At one time, America was a country that was removed and simple in its prejudices. The red man had been defeated and imprisoned, the Black man had been put down, his life codified and his true image erased. And the brown man from south of the border, he was nothing to worry about. The rest of the world, it was too far away to be of any consequence. We fought two world wars within three decades, and hardly one shot was fired on our shores.

The idea of race itself has lost any true significance in the modern world. Today, the Black man has to consider Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and China’s polluted rivers before saying that an action was taken to deprive him of his rights, his humanity. The white man has to wonder who owns the lands that have been traditionally his domain, and the red woman might still get her day in court. The world is changing rapidly, whirling out of control. Black children soldiers kill Black men and Black mothers. White captains of industry close on white high school dropouts. Women deny girls, and there is no true Hispanic. Our lives are run by technology and money, while we talk about color and gender and the way someone rolls her Rs. We live in a fallacy, a virtual world created by a system that only needs for us to toil and die under its rule. And it doesn’t matter if you call yourself Black or white, Jew or Christian, chosen or defiled. What you think, what you feel is true does not matter if you have not come to terms with the image, the Self in the mirror. If the so-called white American impregnates the so-called Asian woman from the example above, then the child that results will be his child, and hers. This simple fact eradicates any notion of a separation of race. If a Black man pays taxes to a government run by gun dealers and oil moguls, and that money is used to buy guns to kill other Black men on other continents, then that taxpayer, regardless of so-called race, has murdered his brother. Our brother. If I light a fire, the smoke fills our air.

Race is a fiction, an outmoded term that is used by the systems that dominate to separate and conquer us, and it has been successful. As long as I am a Black man, a white man, a Chinese woman, or a Jew, I am removed from my species, my genetic identity and destiny. What we need is redemption. An old-fashioned baptism ritual where the one joins the many, where the word “human” means “all women and men.” We have to eradicate the concept of race. If you believe that the word is inaccurate, misleading, and wrong, then you have to make that realization part of your everyday dialogue, worldview, and belief system. You, especially so-called white people, have to deny the tag of race. You are a citizen, as are all people you know and meet, never know and never meet. Our race is based on an overwhelmingly internal sameness between all human beings — the slant of our eyes, the pigmentation of our skin, the texture of our hair, is the very least of us.

You must still ask why I put weight on so-called white people denying their race and replacing it with the notion of humanity. It is because the notion of a white world has brought down all the oppression on all the other so-called colored races of the modern world. Our identity was taken from us where the white identity, albeit unconsciously, was created for the express purpose of domination. When an idea or an ideal was raised to the level of respect, a white face was put on it. From Black cowboys to brown curly-headed Jesus, the imagined white world took our successes and turned them against us. From blues to jazz to rock and roll, we were disenfranchised. The Arapaho didn’t see themselves as Utes or Mohawks, the Puerto Rican knows that he’s not a Mexican. If I give up my so-called Blackness, your so-called whiteness will still be held over and against me. But if you stop being white, the course of history will be instantly and irrevocably changed. It’s like we’re two armed camps at an armistice at the end of a civil war. You attack me first, but we’re just the same. All I’m asking is that you lower your automatic assault rifle before I put down my switchblade. I believe that you could afford this gesture, and that in being offered this token, I will be able to begin to give up the resentment built over 500 years of war waged upon peoples who were, in reality, no different than their attackers. Race is based on gold and cotton and rice, on tobacco and oil, on the perpetuity of wage slavery and death. Lower your claim to a fictive identity, and you will see that there’s a world out there where suffering and riches are shared and dealt with. Where identity centers on the individual, and not the color-coded shades of capitalism. Thank you. [Audience applause]

[Reversed violins are heard to fade-out]