The Fact Of Our Unfortunate Skin

Our attitudes, our beliefs, our views of ourselves and each other, are all shaped by information. And in my article, A War On Truth, I pointed out how unreliable that information is becoming. 

Despite the enormous progress that we’ve made in creating a kinder, fairer, more inclusive world, it feels as if we’re more divided than ever. Not because bigotry has gotten worse, not because our superficial differences outweigh our shared humanity, but because we’ve gotten into the habit of taking sides instead of looking for common ground. 

Mrs C. wasn't buying it.

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Mrs. C:

After all, despite all efforts to convince us otherwise, we aren’t divided by gender or skin colour or sexuality, we’re divided because we try to distil our viewpoints into hopelessly simplistic binaries; you’re either on the Left or the Right. You’re either an anti-racist or a racist. You’re either with us, or you want us dead.

No, we're divided by gender, skin color, and sexuality. We were divided waaay before people all over the world had access to instant, and inaccurate, information. Hating one another is not a contemporary phenomenon. We've been good at this for generations even when our world knowledge was much more circumscribed than it is now.

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Steve QJ:

No, we're divided by gender, skin color, and sexuality.

No. We're not. Any more than we're divided by eye colour or height or which is our dominant hand. These are just ideas that you have accepted as truth to such an extent that you can no longer see how dumb they are.

It's the ideas that separate us. And thankfully, we can overcome them. Otherwise we'd still be burning witches and putting gay people through conversion therapy and executing anybody who said the Earth revolves around the Sun.

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Mrs. C:

I’m an older person, so I have the privilege of telling you that you’re either unobservant or naive. You obviously don’t agree, and that’s fine. I’d be careful about calling some ideas “dumb.” There are plenty out there, but the fact of our unfortunate skin and caste divisions is not one of them. Shalom and Salaam.

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“I’d be careful about calling some ideas “dumb.” There are plenty out there, but the fact of our unfortunate skin and caste divisions is not one of them.”

Up to this point, I’d pegged Mrs C. as a run-of-the-mill cynic who treated making negative comments on the internet as a hobby (it’s surprising how many of these people they are). But describing our skin as “unfortunate”, points to something far more serious.

And while I’ll usually let a clumsy turn of phrase slide if it’s tangential to the topic of conversation. This was not one of those times.

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Steve QJ:

I’m an older person, so I have the privilege of telling you that you’re either unobservant or naive.

I'm younger, so I have the privilege of telling you you're cynical or trapped in the past. Or alternatively, maybe our ages have nothing to do with this.

Let’s be super clear; there is nothing whatsoever unfortunate about my skin. Or yours. The fact that you’d even dream of describing it as such again demonstrates that you’ve bought into ideas you shouldn’t have.

So yes, I am careful about calling ideas dumb. I don’t do so lightly at all. But if there’s an idea that makes you, or anybody, denigrate the colour of their own skin, I'm quite comfortable describing it that way.

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The click-based economy of online media means that only the most depressing, sensationalist news is shoved under our noses. And black people, in particular, get the brunt of this negativity.

Black police shootings, regardless of context, are played on a loop for months on end. Lighthearted, empowering depictions of black characters are given “gritty”, humourless reboots. Black millionaires go on TV and claim with a straight face that we’ve made no progress since the Emancipation Proclamation. And the inevitable result is a kind of knee-jerk cynicism.

But the fact is, and I can’t believe I’m about to say something so brain-dead obvious, the world has changed dramatically since the Emancipation Proclamation.

The fact that there’s still work to be done doesn’t mean that the work already done is meaningless. The fact that black people experience racism doesn’t mean that we should only ever be seen through that lens. The fact that racists look down on people with black skin doesn’t mean we should ever, ever do so ourselves.

We’ll be hearing from Mrs C again in the coming weeks. Let’s see if I can convince her of that.