Color is a frame—a lens—and looking through it defines and sets apart whatever is in the frame. When you put a picture in a frame of any color, you get art. When you put a human being in a frame of color bias, you get prejudice.
Racism is not solely about the color of skin. Racism also pertains to the cultural aspects of the human experience: language, religion, education, class, material resources, personal and collective history. These race identifiers are part of particular cultures and can be altered through immersion, conversion, education, the adoption of different societal norms and expectations, the accumulation of wealth, and so on. However, skin hue is the one part of race that cannot be changed. It is genetic. Aside from getting a very deep tan to develop the melanocytes you already have or bleaching your skin to make it lighter, there is not much you can do about it.
Science does not support the concept of race in terms of skin color. The belief that we are different colors separates us, not the reality. Labels versus the science. Human flesh pigment is brown (melanin) and can be enhanced by exposure to light, just as understanding is illuminated upon exposure to truth. We are lighter or darker depending on the amount of melanin we have in our skin—this pigment is shared by all humans.
The theme of People Are Brown provides an alternate view of race that focuses the lens of our minds on the simple message that people are different shades of the same color. People Are Brown logically guides the reader to accept our essential unity while celebrating the beauty of the “race” colors, and proves, in metaphor upheld by science, that all humans are the same color.
An accompanying curricular guide for parents, teachers, and students provides resources to support exploration of the ideas in the book. The guide will be available through email articles and on this website in the future (TBA). Readers are encouraged to submit ideas for discussion and/or lessons (formal or informal) to be shared with others to advance the narrative about race and color. Please join my mailing list to participate.
