School Daze

To the Editors of the Crimson:

A brief point of information in connection with Melanie Williams review of Spike Lee's School Daze (March 9th): Ms. Williams' observation that Blacks have recently begun to change their eye color to "blue or green in order to conform to the white standard of beauty" unwittingly plays into one of the subtlest games of misinformation that white racism has played on Blacks.

Just as the skin tones of Black people range across the spectrum, so too do the colors of their irises. Two of my cousins, for example, were born with green eyes. No one would ever mistake them for anything but Black, and they are hardly unique specimens.

Many people are unaware of the fact that among a once-nomadic group of endangered East Africans called the lk (described in The Mountain People by anthropologist Colin Turnbull). dark black skin and deep-blue eyes are commonplace, as reference to color photographs in an early 1970's Smithsonian magazine will readily confirm.

Obviously, the relative frequency of a given eye color varies in Black and white populations. But there is no justification for thinking that green and blue irises are somehow the exclusive property of whites.

From the extremes of blacker-than-thou to whiter-than-thou. Blacks have squandered unimaginable energy on intragroup color consciousness Isn't it time to appreciate the possibility that to be Black means, in part to reflect on the whole human family? If Blacks have to put any energy at all into intragroup color, let's celebrate it. We've denigrated it too much for much too long. Marvin Hightower '69