In recent weeks one politician, let’s call him “Doug” questioned the colour of another politician, let’s call her “Karen”.  According to Doug, Karen decided to change the colour of her skin from brown to black.  The way the colour change took place was presented as capricious and confusing.  This little discussion took place in an event organised by the National Association of Black Journalists and it raised some very negative reactions namely on Doug’s audacity to interfere with the right of another person, in this case Karen, to self-identify and chose her own racial identity. 

Perhaps these comments will be remembered or forgotten, but regardless they resonate with me because racial profiling and race identification is still a highly contested term in judicial processes namely law enforcement.  It is even more controversial when considering the origins of these racial profiling and attribution.  One word: colonialism!  I appreciate that this is something that we converse about when we are talking about historical events, on empire expansion and exploitation, that led to genocide and slavery, but this is when I actually think that is partially the picture.  Maybe because the roots on colonialism live with us and they still influence our social reality.    

Colonialism turned skin colour into a commodity.  It became part of the empire’s structure and all European and European influenced empires (i.e. USA or Australia) stand accused of their influence in criminalising skin and racial features.  This influence is long lasting and its indelibly connected with the glorious past of all empires.  Colourism and racial profiling were exploited to justify some of the most heinous crimes in human history.         

To explain; colonialism sounds like an act that happened and eventually ended in time of British abolition of slavery and in US the Emancipation proclamation.  After that, the world fought against it and all forms of it internationally entering article 4 of the UN convention.  All is well!  On the contrary!  My point is that colonialism is far more insidious and deceitful.  People presume that skin colour is a description of attributes and for millennia it was; the intensity of imperial exploitation of people used the colour of the skin as an obvious demarcation of racial separation.  That allowed the imperial powers to keep different populations under control.  Colour became the vehicle of oppression and subjugation.  Empires thrived in dividing the population, utilising race and colour as a wedge that will make it difficult to understand their connected history of repression, making it difficult for people to rise against the tyranny of imperialism. 

Consider the following.  A fourth or fifth child of a Scottish labourer back in the early 19^th century.  Barely educated in reading and writing in a village in the highlands from a family that is hardly making ends meet.  At age 17 he will join the British red coats or scarlet tunics, to be sent anywhere in the empire.  This young man with hardly any life experience will be travelling across the world, using the privilege of his uniform to take, steal and do whatever he wants with impunity.[1]  Years after he will return back to the village he came from with wealth and loot.  His contemporaries will hail him as a success.  In a garage sale today, a delightful old lady is holding  a precious tea cup left by her beloved great-grandfather. 

She holds it in her trembling hands as if the tea cup is talking to her, giving her meaning.  Who can dare to tell this lovely old lady the history of this cup; the blood and pain that it contained long before it travelled across continents?  This is why colonialism is so insidious because it’s subversive making people of the present and the future, custodians of that past, even unbeknown to them. 

Of course, in the original instance between Doug and Karen, what is left out is the biggest and most challenging facet.  That purity of race is a great read for those studying ethnology in the early 20^th century, but we now know that people’s colours and races are a mixture of transgenerational journeys.  People who identify as mixed race, a constituency of people, largely ignored by colonialism because it did not fit into their absurd sense of race classification, is rising.    

Empire with its tales of heroism and greatness makes people yearn for a past that never existed, from a partial perspective that benefited the oppressors, minimising the impact it had on those who they oppressed.  People, their cultures and most importantly their physiology become the casualties of said greatness.  Years and years ago, in conversation with a dear Persian friend I realised that Alexander was Great for me but for Darius, my friend, he was Alexander the Accursed.  If we can see beyond the “greatness” of our own past, perhaps we can read human history more accurately, where human attributes are just that and the colour of the skin should bear no consequences on people’s life or death. 

[1] Similarly to the actions of a Scottish nobleman who stripped off the sculptures of a national monument; something akin to a sport of plunder among the European empires.