Learning about Race, we have all so much to face

Lately I’ve been reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, it’s very interesting because I see so much racism around and it’s something all ‘white people’ have to be educated about this subject, this issue, this historical and appalling condition we have all allowed to fester, and the victims are those of colour, not white people. 

From a young age I was accustomed to all different races and cultures because I was curious, my family to this date are not fully knowledgeable about this subject area, yet they are adamant they are not racist, despite not knowing the history behind it all.

My niece is from Asian descent on her Dad’s side and I look at her and see pure innocent beauty, emanating from within and surface to the world. Children are fascinating because they work so hard all the time, so eager to learn and educate themselves, they have been invited to the world and want so much to do the right thing.

But what constitutes the right thing? Very often it is what parents approve of and dominate views on the world. If you only do what family expects you, that’s not enough, it is evident in our culture that we do not educate our children in schools of all ages the history of colonialists destroyed world peace. We white british have a lot to answer to, our colonial past is evident all around us and in our culture.

As a teen I was unsure about how to paint skin colour because I was no longer believing in pink, white or brown. My teacher, Mr Jackson helped me to understand colour and pigment building in watercolour, in a watercolour painting I created a work that taught me so much about skin colour and the way in which we are all the same colours just different intensities and quantities.

Let me explain, so to portray any skin colour in watercolour you need burnt umber and blue, and water proportions dependant upon thinning of the paint particles with water. And then it is layering the pigment after pigment layer, until the paper fibres are to capacity, obviously the darker/deeper the colour the less layers, but the layers enable the skin sculpting the shape of body and face. It’s a bit technical but you get the gist of this, we are made up of colours of the same just ‘white skins’ are watered or diluted, rather than pure rich colours of a more intense combination, a rich quantity of pigmentation. 

Colour is a matter so current right now, and will be until ‘peoples of colour’ are properly recognised as being human, settle identities and be a stronger unit for the good of humankind. The young generations now and to come are crucial to progress of humanity. Primarily we are all of the same make and we are all created equal it is just humans who define the position of individuals, it’s tragic, we are not just being cruel to each other we are cruel to ourselves by maintaining this atmosphere of hate and ignorance.

Genetically we are all related we all came from Africa, everyone is related in some way to each other. 

Best to understand that I cannot even begin to cover all about racism, I’m not an expert, this is a personal viewpoint that in my experiences in life have taught me lessons of what means awareness of race, and currently the experiences of Meghan Windsor-Mountbatten (Duchess of Sussex) and the book mentioned above by Reni Eddo-Lodge, and of course the great Oprah on AppleTV speaking about racism and the book Castes. Look them up and more.

In my next blog I will address the matter of doing bad things and how that impacts on ourselves, something else to learn about doing the right things, not the bad things.