Book Description

Color of the Skin talks about the color of human skin, which ironically does not exist. However, rather than rejecting the premises of traditional awareness about skin color, the book uses existing perceptions as departure points in examining the inherent characteristics and social trappings surrounding skin color. The book defines the subject, namely color of the skin, with considerable precision, elaborating on its various aspects by dialing forward accounts of ponderings that occurred far back in time and place but that are still fresh and substantive. It successfully distills a few fundamental concepts that widely contrast—in some instances, clash—with existing, popularly known, and commonly understood notions concerning skin color. The book provides comparative descriptions in settings representing two countries: Ethiopia, where color of the skin is straightforward, literal, and simple, where it is used primarily for identifying people, and the United States, where color of the skin is heavily loaded, complex, formal, institutionalized, and often political. The parameters in each abode provide adequate details, indicating the scope and implications of the consequences of the resultant attitudes, actions, and practices thereof, especially in the latter. The author proposes that color is a continuum by hosting a virtual tour through reading trips from the equator out in four directions—north, east, west, and south—narrating all the way, describing and interpreting the topography of human color, which cascades in all directions. Further, the writer suggests that no two persons will have the same color tone, spread, and texture. This is equivalent to saying that there is an individual color but there is no group color. It is close to saying that color of the skin is like fingerprints—each person’s being different from the next. So the gross color division of black and white may be salvaged only when used for convenience and only for immediate references. Any effort to institutionalize and formalize color betrays its natural constitution and thereby compounds the social, economic, and political problems that it has caused. Progressively, the book postulates credible concepts that demonstrate grouping people into black and white is arbitrary, is subjective, and worse, in very significant ways, is often prodded with intentional and exploitive motives. The book invites readers to imagine the reverse of the current world order surrounding the color of skin, putting everyone in good view to appreciate what the world might look like if fortunes tagged to color lines were overturned around the world. The scenario presented under the section “Imagining the Reverse” is one of the light parts of the book, but at its core, the discourse here is indeed about a very serious matter. The author observes that the various configurations used to differentiate countries by slicing them into developed and developing and second and third world countries follow skin color contours. The issue of skin color is elevated to international levels, drawing plausible conclusions that unfortunately, the disadvantages of such perspectives outweigh the advantages. The perceptions derived from such consensus affect world outlook on a number of issues—immigration, bilateral and multilateral economic relations, and individual country’s aspirations, to mention a few—perhaps rendering faulty designs on a national and international scale. The writer takes futuristic perspective, touching on global warming—never mind the causes for now—flagging it as a colossal development that can have an impact on the color of the skin, big time. In this vein, the author surmises that global warming is likely to relentlessly rub against the human skin, turning lighter skin to dull. Brown may be the universal color of the future. The principal motivation of going the distance the book has stretched to pursuing the issue of skin color is to ameliorate the stark differences, biases, and prejudices that old positions have unabatedly generated for a long time both in specific countries and worldwide. Accordingly, a few indicators that are considered to be harbingers of a friendlier, cohesive, fair, peaceful, and prosperous world have been identified. The layout of the preferences to achieve a new, positive, and more functional world order leans on cooperation, understanding, collaboration, and peace—all demands of global realities of today and tomorrow. The discussions that close the book, in addition to heralding where the author is going with the stretch of ideas on color of skin, demonstrate that integration, the impetus for the book, is a two-way traffic and cannot happen without all parties involved being intentional and prepared to change. Often, life is about overcoming differences and savoring similarities. Where there are differences, changes and adaptations are required. The section on integration demonstrates this phenomenon. Tangentially, the book also offers unassuming proposition for peace between Israel and Palestine and a point of view for restructuring the US refugee program.