How To Color

Two Junes ago, tragedy struck my town and no one talked about it until the September after Michael Brown’s dead body turned into the source of a raw red river on Missouri concrete. But suddenly, it was all everyone talked about. Brendan Tevlin was a nineteen-year-old boy who lived in my town and went to a prep school nearby. He was shot eight times, and he was white, and the shooter was brown, and the shooter had motives that made him seem like a member of the society of Seven Days in Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” The shooter was quoted later saying “All these [Iraqi] lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life.”

The day before Thanksgiving break, Wilson was not going to be indicted, and Michael Brown was dead. Brendan Tevlin was dead, and some crazy brown man was on the loose. I was falling in love with Toni Morrison, and a teacher I had asked if language was always and completely incapable. We said yes, and she stopped class fifteen minutes early. She asked about the jury decision, and we mumbled responses. “I don’t,” she said, “see race. I don’t think Wilson is a racist. I don’t see people saying what happened to Brendan Tevlin is racism. I don’t understand how you can hold a gun up to someone and just see a color.”

So with that statement, without any regards to statistics suggesting institutionalized racism particularly involving police brutality, Brendan Tevlin and Ali Muhammad Brown, Michael Brown, and Darren Wilson became simply other cases where color didn't exist and color was causing problems. Where, while white people had spiraled out of racism, had learned to be inclusive, had foundationally and progressively changed, colored people still could not let go of their color. Where white people could see that safety had sacrifices, and colored people still could not understand that violence was never the answer. Even if my teacher was the most brilliant person I have ever met; even if she seemed to understand everything about love, life, art, language, beauty, and kindness; even if she was so passionate and wise she brushed all her students to silence; even if her classes on “Beloved” were so deep that they hurt; she was indisputably and irrevocably white, and she was still wondering if Toni Morrison would ever write a book that had a more universal theme, that wasn’t so political. Colorblindness is a refusal to acknowledge that whiteness is not an ultimate goal, that color, especially in this country, will never be only skin-deep.

I will never be able to describe what kind of humanness I felt when I realized the sentence “Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke” came from color, when I stopped imagining Sally as white and took her as brown and black and, finally, yellow. When yellow faces appeared in my history textbook in pre-Civil War America, when I could answer where I would have sat on Rosa Parks’ bus. When the yellow girls I met were, without reservations and qualifications, stunning and sexual. When I learned to say, first quietly, then loudly, that color is not just oppression. Color is not just an obstacle to being white. Color is driven by pleasure, the slow slippery kind that bleeds into the way you walk, that runs through the crevices of your neck. Color is the way you see, the way you taste, the way you are.

Color is the way you learn to be. And to live without it, to ignore it, is to simply not be.

It is impossible to love yourself without understanding the skin you inhabit. For colored people in America, it’s more difficult to understand that skin because sometimes, it’s almost impossible to taste the pleasure when its color seems to have brought a disproportionate amount of historical, systemic, traditional, brutal pain. But that pain is supposed to be approached, broken through. Because you have to learn to live.

Because when I was learning to be yellow I was learning to live. I was watching my skin shimmer in the sun like gold and I was learning to love a body that seemed as seamless and flat as water. I was extending my toes in cold fresh dirt and learning to cheer when I clapped. Because yellow was something I learned to know. Yellow was how older girls shifted their legs, and yellow was their stories that started with “Three years before Jerry became a sex offender and back when he was pretty, I started skipping SAT class.” Yellow was taping my eyelids open and dancing until I was too dizzy to remember to flirt; and yellow was chicken for dinner and trips to New York and boys like options and high heels and Christmas lights I could never hang on a tree. Yellow was my hands drenched in pond water trying to catch a turtle with my best friend after PSATs. Yellow was how all the characters in every story I ever wrote were white but I was working on it, and yellow was loving e. e. cummings until I didn’t.

And learning to be yellow was learning to be kind. To be kind to myself. To be kind to everyone who believed my successes were their failures and my failures their successes. To be kind enough to not ask “what’s wrong with me.” To be kind to people who thought me too girl or too yellow to talk, to write, to think, to love.

And learning to be yellow was learning to love. To love the way my grandpa said “strawberry” with four syllables. To love both the parts I knew and the parts I would never know about my parents, and all those rail workers and soldiers, plantation workers and picture brides, bachelors, taxi drivers, shop owners, graduate students, and restaurant owners that came before me.

And learning to be yellow is learning to want. To be brave enough to want. To know enough to want. To want snow in June and hellfire in December and half-broken hearts and sweat that tastes like summer.

And learning to be yellow is learning to know. To know that there are two types of oppression: one that comes when others pound it into you, and one that naturally occurs when you decide to stand and watch and simply be. You could spend your lifetime wondering which one your oppression is and never taste freedom. Or you could feel it change you into someone capable and strong, stronger than a gunman, good enough to survive.

Christina Qiu ’19, lives in Matthews Hall. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.