Fifty Shades of White
Combine the seven colours of the rainbow and you get white light. That's not to say that combine all the rainbow flags and you get white. But that seems to be the logic of those waving swastika and Confederate flags in Charlottesville, Virginia that all that is not white is a rainbow of all that is inferior.
Interestingly, the human face, which by the way always has a pair of eyes and eyebrows, a nose, a pair of lips and a pair of ears, irrespective of colour and bleeds the same red when dealt a punch, is never truly white nor truly black. What we call white is actually pink and what we call black is actually dark brown. In fact Asians, as Americans call them (and Far East Asians or Orientals as the rest of the world calls them) are truly white, though why are they called yellow, I have no idea. Perhaps when the colour tags were being assigned, the lone "Asian" (Far Eastern) sample had jaundice and I can bet my brown behind that the jaundiced eye of a pink man (not a woman) etched that colour label into history.
Perhaps the pink and the dark brown were tagged when photography came into the picture—"black" and "white" picture. And then it was "black" and "white" TV. On both these mediums the pink looked white and the dark brown looked black. On that token, the "Asian" should have been white, a much cleaner (dermatologist's dream) version and the brown people grey.
But somewhere, the colour white made it to the top, despite containing all the colours of the spectrum while black ended up at the other end of the racial spectrum. Since the superior precedes the inferior in the social strata, I would have thought it would be white and black TV, ivory and ebony, the black belt leading to the white belt in martial arts, a white tie event, white formal shoes (only Mithun Chakraborty followed that rule), white formal suit, white coffee, white at funerals, the White Sea, Whiteberry being the most secure mobile device, white Casio G-Shock watches, white bomber jackets, (at the height of the civil rights movement in America) the SR-71 Whitebird spy plane, business books striving to be in the white and not in the black, the Whitehawk helicopter, the whitejack at casinos, snow being white gold and much pricier than black gold, the phrase "once you go white you never go…", the saying "X is the new white", us dying to dye our hair white to look younger, a whiteout and not a blackout as the best defence against air raids, thousands milling about to see the white moon and not the black moon (solar eclipse), a black lie instead of a white lie, a blackwash instead of a whitewash in cricket, black trash instead of white trash, a game of chess in essence being a racial warfare, (supposedly) Robert Mugabe saying that it is a white toilet paper that wipes his black…
Then again, in our land of Fair and Lovely, we DO say 'shada kalo' (white black).
But why Charlottesville? "We want America back"—says the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) boss. Nice words, but he should have quoted the source—the Native Americans. The KKK loves Trump, who took 48 hours to call it out for what it is, whereas he takes a fraction of 48 seconds to call out CNN "fake news".
Even ISIS distanced itself from the 20 year old hillbilly from Ohio who rammed his car into the crowd, killing one and injuring many. But history is made with the reincarnation of the redneck terrorist (the first one was seen in 1492).
Thank goodness I'm not living in the US now. I'm a brown techie and the KKK would show up in front of my house and leave a burning laptop. Also, thank goodness there are fifty shades of white with the first 48 shades labelling the 50th not as milk, but as rotten yogurt. Oh, and the 49th? There is really one person in this shade with a tinge of orange, supported by all in the 50th shade of white, who is definitely giving the "White" House a truly different meaning…
Naveed Mahbub is an engineer at Ford & Qualcomm USA and CEO of IBM & Nokia Siemens Networks Bangladesh turned comedian (by choice), the host of ATN Bangla's The Naveed Mahbub Show and ABC Radio's Good Morning Bangladesh, and the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club.
E-mail: Naveed@NaveedMahbub.com
Comments