Color Confusion aka Confessions of a Priveliged White Girl(TM)
I was writing this story, parts of which is inspired by my own ideas about people and color. Or the colors of people. What you will. And I thought the background for those ideas might be interesting to post about. Well that, and I'm done with my translation draft, it's past midnight, and I'm bored. Ahem. Anway:
When I was growing up at Bøler, a suburb of Oslo in Norway, in the mid-to-late eighties, there were hardly any black people around. Oh, you'd meet the odd non-white person on the street, but they were few and far between. In my entire school, both grammar school and junior high, or rather the equivalents thereof, there were perhaps four or five non-white people. I knew what black people looked like, of course. I saw them on TV all the time; in American tv-shows and movies, in magazines and music videos. A lot of famous people were black - Bill Cosby, for example. There were black people, and white people, each looking a certain way. And, of course, there were a rare few people who were half black and half white, and they also looked a certain way. And this, in my simplistic view, was how the world worked.
Then, when I was about twelve, I started watching Red Dwarf. Lister, or rather Craig Charles, confused me. He didn't look like anyone I'd ever seen before. Was he white? Was he black? He didn't fit into any of the categories I'd neatly put into my brain. It was really fascinating, and probably part of why I felt attracted to him. Now, you might have wondered why I hadn't seen Mariah Carey, and thus understood how the concept of "multi-racial" works in terms of what a person might look like. Well, the sad truth is, until I was in my late teens I thought she was white. I know. *sigh* Of course, later I met duckface, who in one memorable letter-on-tape informed me of the concept of genetics.
At any rate, I was quite confused and frustrated by the whole thing. And at one point, I just decided to say "fuck it all", and promptly decided that "black" and "white" were poorly fitting descriptions, and started using other terms. People who were some sort of middling brown/pink-ish tone I dubbed "beige". They are my favorite kinds of people, in terms of looks, still. And there you have it. Personally, I consider myself a rather fetching pale pinkish orangey color.
What color are you?
When I was growing up at Bøler, a suburb of Oslo in Norway, in the mid-to-late eighties, there were hardly any black people around. Oh, you'd meet the odd non-white person on the street, but they were few and far between. In my entire school, both grammar school and junior high, or rather the equivalents thereof, there were perhaps four or five non-white people. I knew what black people looked like, of course. I saw them on TV all the time; in American tv-shows and movies, in magazines and music videos. A lot of famous people were black - Bill Cosby, for example. There were black people, and white people, each looking a certain way. And, of course, there were a rare few people who were half black and half white, and they also looked a certain way. And this, in my simplistic view, was how the world worked.
Then, when I was about twelve, I started watching Red Dwarf. Lister, or rather Craig Charles, confused me. He didn't look like anyone I'd ever seen before. Was he white? Was he black? He didn't fit into any of the categories I'd neatly put into my brain. It was really fascinating, and probably part of why I felt attracted to him. Now, you might have wondered why I hadn't seen Mariah Carey, and thus understood how the concept of "multi-racial" works in terms of what a person might look like. Well, the sad truth is, until I was in my late teens I thought she was white. I know. *sigh* Of course, later I met duckface, who in one memorable letter-on-tape informed me of the concept of genetics.
At any rate, I was quite confused and frustrated by the whole thing. And at one point, I just decided to say "fuck it all", and promptly decided that "black" and "white" were poorly fitting descriptions, and started using other terms. People who were some sort of middling brown/pink-ish tone I dubbed "beige". They are my favorite kinds of people, in terms of looks, still. And there you have it. Personally, I consider myself a rather fetching pale pinkish orangey color.
What color are you?