Color-Blind
Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World
Chapter One
Can a new race surmount old prejudices?
Americans are accustomed to infinite shades of ebony, but the South African journalist Mzimkulu Malunga found the notion hilarious. So he named one celebrity after another--Tina Turner, Vanessa Williams, Mariah Carey--tickled at the thought that anyone might consider them all black. The impromptu racial-identity game soon had the small group in Soweto in stitches. It seemed an appropriately absurd end to an evening spent, for the most part, in more serious conversation in a country whose governing principle once had been: "Tell me your race, and I'll tell you your place." As his guests finished a dinner of beer, beans, beef, and a grits-like delicacy called pap, Malunga, business editor of The Sowetan, finally shrugged as if to say: Race is a strange and flexible concept, with an endless capacity to confound.
That evening took me back to an encounter, some years earlier, on a bus several miles outside Caracas, Venezuela. Upon learning I was from the United States, the dark-skinne ... read full excerpt from Color-Blind ebook
