The Color Initiative
When I
sat down with the editors of The World, the
joint BBC/WGBH national radio program, my original idea was to embark on a
series of stories about race relations across the globe. But the more we thought about the issue of
race and all the social constructs concomitant to this issue, the more we
realized that the stories we envisaged were about something much broader:
color. The mission of the The Color Initiative, is to examine complex global issues
of politics, culture, history and society through the framework of human
perceptions and experiences related to skin color.
Color
often explains what race cannot. For
example, among the stories we plan to examine is the issue of “whitening” in virtually racially
homogenous nations across Asia, principally China, Taiwan and Korea, and the
social and political explanations for its mass appeal. But that’s not where we
began. The first report in the on-going
series looked at the marketing campaign of Benetton, which mixes business with socially
conscious messages focusing on diversity of all sorts, including color. Benetton’s messages are now coming up
against growing anti-immigrant realities in Europe, including the dominant
presence of the Northern League in the very Italian
city where Benetton is headquartered: Treviso.
The
story was motivated by an experience I had had years earlier. Driving south from the
Dolomites to Venice
several summers ago, I had passed dozens of identical billboards advertising
the United Colors of Benetton. An
idyllic picture of interracial friendship was shattered near Belluno. Someone had thrown a rock through the
wallpapered head of a charcoal-colored boy and scribbled in Italian: Questi colori non mischiano (Miss-kia-no):
“These colors do not mix.”
Since that time, Italylike the rest of Western
Europehas experienced a surge in immigration with a blend of nationalities and
colors unprecedented in modern European history: Senegalese, Moroccans,
Bulgarians, Romanians, and Nigerians among others. And their presence has
sparked a major backlash. My
planpending future fundingis to take a closer look at the experiences of Roma
and Senti people, who often are referred to as “black” as a way of designating
their lower social status in European societies.
For
many people outside the US, race is an essential part of what defines America.
And it is Hollywood that is helping to supply many of the images. That was the
subject of the second Color report on the World.
Two
of the more talked about stories in the
series thus far also concerned immigrants, but in this case immigration to the
United States. Between 1881 and
1920 about twenty-four million immigrants from southern and eastern Europe put
down roots in the US. In color terms
they were regarded as neither black nor white, but as a sort of
"IN-BETWEEN” people -who would gradually become white -often after
petitioning to the courts. To be white was to be more privilegedin the context
of America’s strict racial pecking order. That was the subject of Part One of How Europeans Became White. Part two of
this report begins in the 1970s with a new wave of olive, tan and beige skinned
immigrants who arrived to these shores seeking the same opportunities. But
Americans’ perceptions of color had become far more complex by then says David
Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness:
Acceptance as fully white for this group of immigrants is very open to question: To Islamic immigrants or people who look like they might be of Islamic faith, particularly after 9/11. It’s open to question on the part of Asian immigrants because of the tremendous weight of the history of exclusion in the United States. Similarly but more complicated is the case with Latino immigrants (David Roediger).
That
has been a common lament of many undocumented Mexicans in the United States,
among others, who allege that liberty and justice for them differs dramatically
from the treatment of European immigrants who also may be in the country
illegally.
Two
other reports in the series looked at color discrimination practiced by some
American servicemen and women against Iraqis in Iraq (Coloring Iraqis) who are often demeaned as "Hadjis," "Camel jockeys," and "sand niggers." We also spoke to
military educators who are working to address the broad implications of this
issue. Our story on Malaysia’s ethnic
Indians explored the growing movement in that country to end color hierarchy that
reigns over all aspects of society, though ostensibly there is no color
discrimination in Malaysia.
In the
coming months the Color Initiative will also examine the role of mestizos in Mexico and look at the
provenance of Puerto Rico’s claim to be the land of the "rainbow people" and what that means in practice. The most ambitious aspect of the Initiative
will be a multi-part series on Color
Across Asia.
W.E.B.
DuBois observed more than 100 years
ago that the problem of the 20th Century "is the problem of the Color Line.”"
As we have witnessed in a Democratic Party primary election that began
with so much hope and descended into racial acrimony, and with ethnic and
racial tensions stirring from Tibet to Bolivia, it’s clear that the problem of
the color line is also the problem of the 21st century, and it knows
no borders.
--Phillip Martin, Correspondent for The Color Initiative