Examine the following paragraph from today's Washington Post and you can see a fundamental North American white supremacist paradigm shifting and giving way:
What many Republican leaders fail to understand is that the party is leaving votes on the table that could be theirs. Votes they once were able to attract before they became viewed as a collection of mean, monochromatic and reactionary people clinging to Ronald Reagan’s America instead of coming to terms with, if not embracing, the vibrant nation we live in today. (Emphasis added.)
On the pages of the Washington Post, at least one younger African-American writer has begun to realize that America is heterochromatic, the Republican Party is "monochromatic," and "race" (which was once considered the only appropriate term for "skin color") is actually a fallacious fantasy concept with no basis in science or relevance in analytic social studies.
In fact, in the above paragraph, Johnathan Capehart demonstrates that it is entirely possible and, yes, preferable to discuss skin chromaticity, and monochromaticity, without every using the term "race."
In fact, in the above paragraph, Johnathan Capehart demonstrates that it is entirely possible and, yes, preferable to discuss skin chromaticity, and monochromaticity, without every using the term "race."
In a feat that many Black and white writers still believe to be impossible, Mr. Capehart writes his entire article, explaining every proposition about skin color without ever using or relying upon the anachronistic and unscientific "race" fallacy. It's instructive to read the comments to the article as well, since the word "race" is used twenty-nine times in the comments to an article that never mentions "race" at all. Apparently, many misinformed readers still believe that they cannot discuss skin color without reference to "race," and so that pejorative epithet persists in the conversation.
I first began to use the term bi-chromatic in, perhaps, 2007, when I realized that (1) continuing to use the "race" word inevitably perpetuates the false belief that "races" exist in the first place, and (2) chromaticity is a scientific word referring to a quality that can be measured in a scientific way, while "race" is a white supremacist term referring to centuries-long propaganda effort aimed at convincing Blacks and whites that science existed where it didn't.
To see how revolutionary is the reference to chromaticity instead of "race," consider how often the word "race" is used in an opening paragraph of a 1896 ex-slave autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs, and how much the term defined and circumscribed the writer's sense of who she was and what that meant:
To see how revolutionary is the reference to chromaticity instead of "race," consider how often the word "race" is used in an opening paragraph of a 1896 ex-slave autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs, and how much the term defined and circumscribed the writer's sense of who she was and what that meant:
We, as the Negro Race, are a free people, and God be praised for it. We as the Negro Race, need to feel proud of the race, and I for one do with all my heart and soul and mind, knowing as I do, for I have labored for the good of the race, that their children might be the bright and shining lights. And we can see the progress that we are making in an educational way in a short time, and I think that we should feel very grateful to God and those who are trying to help us forward. God bless such with their health, and heart full of that same love, that this world can not give nor taketh away.There are many doors that are shut to keep us back as a race, but some are opened to us, and God be praised for those that are opened to the race, and I hope that they will be true to their trust and be of the greatest help to those that have given them a chance.
So profound is the concept of race, as opposed to mere skin-color, embedded in her understand of herself and her world that she uses the term "race" five times in two paragraphs, without ever mentioning skin-color, which was the specious basis upon which the existence of fallacious "race" was proposed.
Clearly that slave narrative reflects a fundamental acceptance of the difference and otherness that the term "race" implies, with separate aspirations based on skin color as a fact of life, but which paradigm a substantial number of white-skinned American voters rejected in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, when they decided that brown-skinned Barack Obama was more similar to them and their aspirations than was white-skinned John McCain and Mitt Romney, while rejecting the paradigm in which skin-color = race = fundamental and over-arching difference.
Clearly that slave narrative reflects a fundamental acceptance of the difference and otherness that the term "race" implies, with separate aspirations based on skin color as a fact of life, but which paradigm a substantial number of white-skinned American voters rejected in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, when they decided that brown-skinned Barack Obama was more similar to them and their aspirations than was white-skinned John McCain and Mitt Romney, while rejecting the paradigm in which skin-color = race = fundamental and over-arching difference.
Johnathan Capehart's use of the word "monochromatic" is, I predict, a sign of a fundamental reordering of this nation's and the world's understanding of what skin chromaticity means and doesn't mean as a matter of science. As a matter of genetics, skin color means skin color and cannot be relied upon to mean anything else at all, according to the US Department of Energy's Human Genome Project findings, based on mapping the entire human genome.
