White, Red, Brown and Black

White, red, brown and black?- if you have to choose.

The concept of skin color has been on my mind ever since I had moved out of my country of birth, and started living in a country where the majority of the people have less pigmentation than I do. Obviously, this had not disturbed me back in Ethiopia. Once I was in Israel, though it was the first thing that I discovered about myself, I look darker than most people. It is not that I never knew that,  I did know that but it did not seem important then. I remember the first two or three weeks in Israel, my skin looked darker to me than it ever was. Call it culture shock, or increase in self-consciousness but it really did make me notice that for most people that might be the first thing they notice about me.

In Ethiopia, people refer to skin color as white (reserved to yes! You guessed it- white people), red (key- someone like Barack Obama), teyim (brown skinned—let us say Mandella) and black ( meaning dark complexioned). There were connotation to skin color embedded in the language, culture and history, that tended to associate, the red complexioned people to nobility, and the dark complexioned people to lower status in the society. Yet this was nothing automatic, there were light skinned kings and dark skinned kings. Poor people of “red” complexion of the skin and wealthy “black” people.

So most Ethiopians, undergo the transformation of being reclassified as black once they come to countries where the color code is quite different to the one they were familiar with. I, for one, never was fooled by this sub-classification. I was the darker than most of my siblings, my mother and I were brown skinned. My sister and brother, are light skinned and so is my father. Some among my country men learn that they are really black and not 'red' or 'teyim', in the land beyond the seas. There they meet a whole different rule of classification, where it could be more of “ if it ain’t white, it is black”.

I am not going to go into the discussion of black-white dichotomy. I am sorry to disappoint, if there are who are disappointed. I guess I am just reminded on how language and words on the meanings they carry. The phrase ‘black man’ as used in English seems so outdated and hopefully is becoming less and less politically correct. The term white man is no more politically correct.

In a way the greatest political incorrectness in the use of the word black man or white man is not the color we attach to it, but it is the way we classify the world into white, yellow and black. Like all dichotomies the removal of one part of the dichotomy defeats the dichotomy as a whole. Perhaps that is why we should drop the use of the word black man first. Soon the word, white man will be a reference that is as meaningless as the word black man.