Skin-color Discrimination:
Fools Gold

Frank Thomas Williams wrote a column in this magazine some months ago lamenting that America discriminates against its citizens and allocates privileges based on the hue of a person's skin, and as I was reading Gail Buckley's book on Blacks in the military, his essay came to mind. As it did, I thought about the foolishness of discrimination based on skin color. There are a thousand other reasons that would make sense more than skin color.

How tragic it is for one to look at another person and only see the limits of that person's worth and behavior as might be dictated by and through a prism of skin color, even assuming the color of skin imbues a person with certain qualities and attributes. It does not! Far from it.

This thing called race, more specifically, this thing called skin color is an American obsession that is without reason and more than that, it is extreme to the point of being pathological. I have lived long enough to see, recognize, and feel the sting of hatred, as racial discrimination represents, for no other reason than skin color.

As a child of 12 years old, I was pulled over by white cops and traumatized not because of anything that merited pulling over or traumatizing, but because my skin's color was ebony. Pulling me over because of the color of my skin is not the behavior of a mature, sound thinking person; that is the behavior of one who is ill with a skin color disease.

I cannot believe that a rational, mature person can look at ebony skin and think it unattractive; not only that, but one cannot look at skin and determine a person's nature. Those types of conclusions can only be arrived at by a mad man. Yet, it is precisely those types of pathological conclusions and reasoning that have come into vogue in America as if they were a secretly normal, good, and right through pathway through which all things must flow.

Judging on the basis of skin color is a poor science for determining human value and behavior; it is, in fact, no science at all. Skin color may determine whether one is sun-burned and risk exposure to cancerous invasion, but behavior? I think not.

It is even duplicitous for one to feign the horrors of black or brown skin, then race frequently to tanning salons and beaches to blacken himself/herself. That behavior says, and behavior speaks more strongly than words, not that dark skin is unattractive, but dark skin is desirable and good. And since that statement is made in the most forceful way--by actions--why then is there vocalization to the contrary of one's behavior and attendant actions of discrimination based on skin color?

One can argue that skin color is associated with race, and race is associated with certain cultural behavior patterns, but that rationalization, and that is all that it is, does not explain the actions of Americans. In this nation, a Black person can be fully African American, as much as most Americans are of any pure line, but with pink skin, and behavior toward that person is different--without discrimination--as if the person's skin color makes him/her different or special. That type of behavior is madness and defies rational thought, which is not to say it is not rationalized; yet it is a practice of many.

In behaving this way, Americans show themselves to be clinically ill, while maintaining a statistical normality. This behavior is clearly not what intelligent individuals do, regardless of a person's education. However, it is a fact that educated people are less bent toward discrimination than their less educated counterparts.

One can conclude that since dark skin is desired by many who are pink--as evidenced by the many tanning activities paid for and not--yet many pronounce horrors on those with dark skin, even while they pay to become dark. Behavior as America exhibits it is not the behavior of those who think dark skin is undesirable. Maybe it's the behavior of a jealous pretender; maybe it's the behavior of a system to ensure a benefiting caste; maybe it's the behavior of a custom that is so deeply planted until it is simply done without thought, as if it is normal. Whatever the rationalization for this behavior's existence, it exists and functions as any organic system does: It seeks to maintain itself by justifying and safeguarding itself.

As I read Gail Buckley's book on the many Black American war heroes who gave their lives, I felt the same type of deep-seated unfairness of history and historians that I felt those many years ago, when I read the A.J. Rogers book. Why couldn't or didn't they tell the history correctly? These things that happened, the heroism of Blacks, the sacrifices made for this nation were not shared with us all and the world. But more than not shared, they were deliberately hidden and distorted for a reason. That reason was a skin reason and another agenda as well.

White heroism was vaunted; Black heroism was overlooked and not mentioned. Then why mention any?

People are buoyed by the courage of their own, and for the unfairness that was/is applied to non-white people in America, they need to see themselves as unworthy and undeserving, and beneath the vaunted. But in so doing--elevating one and diminishing another--they inadvertantly strengthened many of those whom they attempted to mentally and in every other way crush.

No lie can live forever, Martin King said, and one's self worth will eventually assert itself, regardless of the oppressive techniques applied. Apparently, America has not learned from its own history. This reason for discrimination was to give one the self worth while oppressing the other. And for every oppressive act, there must be a rationale to justify it. The color of the skin was it. That rationale has evolved down to this day, and much like the woman who cut off the ends of a perfectly good ham each year without any thought about doing so or why, sadly, most white Americans discriminate on the basis of skin with no thought of of a reason or the insanity of passed rationales. But the idea that one discriminates against one and favors another because of the color of the skin is so simple that any normal thinking person must run for another cover if he or she claims to possess sanity; for a skin color justification for discrimination is fools gold. []

Frank A. Jones

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