Colorblind Sometimes

Last night I saw interdisciplinary hip hop artist Baba Israel perform. The roots of Baba's beatboxing, storytelling and radical pedagogy run deep within his DNA: From the 50s through the 80s, his parents were members of legendary anarchist performing arts ensemble The Living Theatre, and Baba's own work traces a vibrant through-line from his folks' relationships to New York's jazz revolutionaries, Beat poets, Yippee upstarts, squatter cartoonists and avant gardettes, coupled with brushes with his own generation's most talented MCs and DJs of more recent decades.

I sat close so I could see the man more clearly, and was surprised when, 50 minutes in, Baba mentioned his own "white skin." I thought he was mixed, Black and Ashkenazi Jew, but later learned that presumed African half was actually Anglo. And, "Yeah," he later told me when I told him what my head had done, "I get asked if I'm Latino sometimes."

Being a person who sometimes sees only in shadow, I often cannot determine details such as skin tone. In this specific instance, I thought of Adam Mansbach's 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy, a modern nod to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, but about a white cab driver steeped in hip hop culture. When the cabbie starts robbing businessmen at gunpoint, the papers all report that he's black because those robbed don't see their assailant's skin beyond the barrel of a gun and that B-boy affect in his voice. 

I've been told and consoled, "the blind are also colorblind," but Adam Mansbach and Baba Israel show that the sighted can also be blind. Seeing skin tone and ethnicity is a multi-sensory process, and one infused with judgments based on our own experiences—a brown paper bag test that continuously constructs the façade of race. That façade may be a bit more malleable for someone like me who sometimes doesn't see and can't differentiate subtleties in skin pigment, therefore other senses and experiences must play a bigger part: a voice, a narrative, an accent, a gesture, a stance and all other aesthetics coalesce into a picture of personhood, with my mind sussing up said person's culture and then creating some imaginary color that corresponds to it. For Baba Israel, that color was "black"—not the kind in the Crayola 8-pack, but a complex cultural blackness that could also include swaths of "white" (or pink, or beige, or whatever color "Caucasian" is). But at the mention of his own "white skin", the fictitious pigment began to fade and presumed melanin grew thin.

Colorblind? Sometimes. And sometimes just colorblinded by judgments picked up that I can't quite put down, no matter how hard I let go.