It makes me almost uncomfortable when black people continually remind everyone that they are black. I understand that their blackness is a huge part of their personal identity and while that makes sense, it is still awkward to constantly have that blackness pushed in my face. Race has never really seemed like a big deal to me, probably because I am white and I grew up in a very white-dominant area of the state, but I just don’t understand the need to continually remind the world of your skin color. When Dr. Neil was writing to his daughter in his blog, “Chocolate Granola Girl”, he said his dad taught him how to be a man…no, a black man. He didn’t just call her a little girl or a little ten-year-old girl, but a 10-year-old brown girl. I don’t know why that’s the thing that jumped out at me so much, but it really bothered me.
It seems to me that what he’s doing is epidermalization or essentialization as much as white people judging people based on their skin color. He’s not judging, but he’s constantly bringing it up. Even the name of his blog is the “new black man”. I think that until people can let race just be something in the background instead of at the forefront of everything that is said or done, it’ll always be an issue. I guess I’ve never understood why the color of someone’s skin is such a hot-button issue and such an important factor in identity. I mean, it feels like me saying—“life is tough for the green-eyed girls of the world”. It’s just a colo;, it’s just the top layer of an organ on your body. The whole thing is very frustrating to me. From what I can tell, Marc Anthony Neil is a very intelligent, open-minded, excellent writer, but I don’t think it’s possible for the world to truly progress past the point of racial issues as long as everyone spends so much time focusing on them.
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