Colors
I have described myself in this weblog and elsewhere as an “old white dude.” I would like to amend this. I am not just white — that’s just my hair. I am predominantly pink.
No, that’s not a statement of socialist views. Other than a few brown spots — the freckles I got in my youth and some speckles added by age — my skin is pink. Just look and . . . well, take my word for it.
And yet a lot of people still describe me and themselves as white, which is why, I guess, that I do it, too. It’s not something a perceptive kid would say about anybody except an albino. It’s something we learn that, for whatever reason, overrides our raw perceptions.
In 1992, I was in a laundromat in Savannah, Ga., when a fellow patron, an African-American man, asked me if I was from Canada.
“Pretty close — northern New Hampshire,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re the whitest dude I ever saw.”
Now this was part of a friendly conversation, and I wasn’t about to discuss stereotypes — nor to observe that he wasn’t exactly black. More of a medium brown, I would say.
I had written about this a few years earlier. It was after I met Gene and Lorraine Stanton, also at a laundromat, this one in Comanche, Texas, in 1989. The Stantons, a 60ish couple from a long line of hardworking families, had given up their farm in Iowa and were spending a lot of time in their 10-year-old Ford 460, a long-body pickup with a camper in the back.
“I guess what we finally decided,” Gene said, “is that our time was being consumed rather than used.”
It sounded to me like the scions of the family tree were growing wild again. And here’s some of what I wrote about that in Chapter 54 of ‘Adrift in America,’ a book found elsewhere on this website:
That’s a good thing in botany. Breaking away and hybridizing is what gives the new plants their vigor.
In my own family, most of us have pink skin and blue eyes, but then there’s Granny’s mother. Etta Wiggin Sanborn was such a wonderful great-grandmother – she used to plant big wet kisses on my young face – that it wasn’t until years after her death that I noticed in photos of her that she had straight black hair and coppery, high-cheeked features, including one blue and one hazel eye, that fit neither the Sanborn nor the Wiggin mold. Granny has no explanation, although she suspects Indians. I’d guess either that or Africans. Frankly, high cheekbones and large teeth look pretty on my mother, and I’m comfortable with them, too.
The point is, genealogies are generally a crock. And not just historically. Tracing any family through one name becomes genetically pointless after a few generations. If I’m a descendant of Thomas Leavitt (or was it his brother, John, the other ne’er-do-well Brit locked up in the Portsmouth, N.H., brig shortly after their arrival in America?) . . . and if there are 15 generations between us (that’s 300 years at 20 years per generation), I’m not just carrying the genes of Thomas and 15 other guys. I’ve also got to count my mother, her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on and my father’s mother and her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. In three centuries, the number comes out to 32,768 ancestors. That’s a small city. And if I can find an ancestor only three generations back who’s an unusual color, I can only imagine those who jumped into the genetic pool before color photography was invented.
This color business bothers me, and not just because of my liberal, socialist view of the world. I’m not white, I’m pink. And I’ve never known any black people, although I’ve met many shades of brown, including some that were lighter than my pink.
If we have to categorize people in this country of immigrants, it makes more sense to do it by place of ancestral origin. The easiest seems to be by continent. Euro-American, Afro-American, Asian-American. Anything that fits two syllables before ‘American.’ If we have to do it at all. If we insist on genealogies.
Actually, we could do it by color. But we’d have to get a lot better at identifying colors. In one of his more brain-damaging speeches, Ronald Reagan promised that his administration was dedicated to having a color-blind society. Frankly, that’s not the solution. That’s the problem. We’ve been color-blind for centuries, and it has hurt a lot of people.
Any junior high school science student learns the optics of color. White is all colors. Black is no color. And yet we go out into a society where we are expected to see no color in white and the deepest of color in black.
We’ve got a lot of problems in this country, and many of them begin with the fact that we colored people consider some of us black and some of us white.
Well, this old pink-and-white dude rests his case.
– Sid Leavitt
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