COMPLEXION: BROWN

One of my Negro students was showing me his I. D. card, issued to him by one of the branches of the military. Though I did not mention it to him, it struck me as strange that in their description of him they identified him as “Brown” in the space asking for Complexion. Not Negro. Not black. But Brown.

It made me curious as to how they might have identified a Latin American, but I carried the matter no further. But it did cause me to study the young man’s complexion as he went on with his purpose for calling on me. He was a brown man. His bright white teeth were accentuated by their dark brown background. But his black tie clearly testified to the fact that he was not black. The military was correct. He was brown.

Yet the I. D. card in the hands of a military policeman might be misleading, for we have arbitrarily divided the human family, whether soldiers or not, into white, black, brown, red, and yellow. And by such arbitrary guidelines the M. P. might be looking for a Latin, for they are the browns.

I sat there in my office at the college pondering that description—Brown. The Negro is not really black, but brown. Dark brown in some instances perhaps, but still brown. Then I looked at my own complexion, placing my hand against my white shirt. I am clearly no more white than my student was black. A clown sometimes paints his face white, which is in bold contrast to the natural color of his “white” skin. A white man would be a scarecrow or a freak, as would a red man or a yellow man.

We are indeed all brown. God’s great sea of humanity is all the way from very fair to very dark, but the hue is brown, as is so much in the universe. I began to look at my friends around the campus from this perspective. A fellow philosopher is a Chinese gentleman, born in Peking, and as delightful a person as can be imagined. He has a “reverence for life” philosophy after the order of Albert Schweitzer, which expresses itself especially in a love for cats. He is such an unforgettable person that I may have to do an article on him one day. Anyway, I looked at him anew and asked myself how it ever happened that the Chinese should be called yellow. He too was clearly brown. A military I. D. card would no doubt do him justice. Complexion: Brown.

Latins are all over the campus, especially in the form of Cubans, refugees from Castro’s dictatorship. Most of them are professors who are still having trouble with their English, but they are a friendly lot. They agonize over what is happening to such institutions as the University of Havana, whose research in medicine and other fields was once among the most fruitful in the world. They are of course all brown. Not brown like shoes are brown exactly, but still brown. Their own hue of brown. Not brown like Negroes are brown. And not brown like Caucasians are brown.

So it is with all men. We are all varying shades of brown. The differences are not as great as our racial conflicts would suggest. And once we get beyond the pigment of the skin the unity of mankind is even more evident. We have the same needs, the same emotions, the same drives. Triumph and tragedy come to us all, and our responses to them are very similar, irrespective of our shade of brown. The birth cry of a firstborn is as sweet a sound to a light brown woman as to a dark brown woman, and the cruel hand of death that snatches away a loved one is as bitter to one as to the other. Life is difficult for us all, and victory can come only as men see each other in the image of God, however brown.

I have a friend in these parts, one recently liberated from racial bigotry, who has his own way of eliciting a little thought along these lines. Whenever someone is identified as “a colored man,” he responds by kindly asking, “What color?” It is a neat way of pointing out that if the Negro is colored, then we all are. And is the color really so different after all? And even if color is clearly distinguishable, what does it really matter?

This was the point I was trying to make to my little Benjy, then only 8 years old. It was his time to pass the credit card out to the attendant serving our automobile. For years that has been a big deal, handing over the credit card, and each of the three children has succeeded in confusing me as to why this has to be such a problem. Well, it was Benjy’s time, or so it seemed once we went through the usual rigmarol. But I make them wait until the attendant is through before they start waving the card in his face. “Now can I give the card to the Negro man,” said Benjy. I handed the card to Benjy. He passed it to the attendant. Then the attendant passed it back to Benjy. Then Benjy hands it back to me. Big deal.

A mile or so down the road I asked Benjy, “Why did you ask me if you could hand the card to the Negro man?” He thought for a moment, probably wondering if he had pronounced the word the way I had taught him to. He is something, that boy is. In reference to Negroes, we had tried through the years to make no point of any difference between black and white, so if we had company coming over we refrained from making any speech about how there’s to be a Negro in the crowd and therefore be careful what you say. We simply said nothing about it. Well, years ago when he was but 5 or 6, I took him with me to get a girl at one of the T.W.U. dorms who needed a ride to a party at our house. I said nothing to Benjy about her being Negro, but I will admit that I was a little apprehensive about what he might say, knowing as I did that black people were a curiosity to him.

On the way to the house Benjy found a long enough gap in the conversation to slide in front of her, and with a smile on his innocent little face asked her, “Are you a Negro?,” pronouncing the word both accurately and lovingly. She was obviously pleased. “Indeed I am?,” she responded, and she said it in such a way that he saw that she was thankful to be what God made her.

Well, that’s the Benjy that wanted to hand the card to the Negro man. He defended himself by saying, “Well, he was a Negro, wasn’t he?” “Yes, he was,” I admitted. But I added, “Why was it that the last time you handed the card to the attendant you didn’t say, ‘Daddy, can I hand the card to the white man?’ You just said man when he was white. Why didn’t you just say man this time? Why Negro man?”

It set him to thinking, and it is something for us all to think about. Color consciousness is a sign of our immaturity. If a fellow man can be to us one for whom Christ died, then we have the answer to most problems of personal relationship. One of the great truths of the Bible is the declaration that “God made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth.” Complexion? Does it really matter?

There is talk these days among the Negroes about “a black Christ,” which is as much of a fallacy as talk of “a white Christ” or “a Jewish Christ:’ And some of the rebels are telling us to take our “blue-eyed Jesus” and begone. Perhaps we deserve such a rebuke, not because we have been guilty of nationalizing Jesus, but because we have failed to make the religion of Jesus truly catholic in our lives. So it really isn’t Jesus they fault, but the Jesus they see in us. We are not just white, but also affluent, urbane, middle-class, sophisticated. We are impatient with odor, dirt, untidiness, simplicity, hair, uncouthness, all of which probably characterized the man Jesus. We are impressed with fame, fortune, prestige, position. The real Jesus, blue-eyed or not, would be considered a nut among the professed Christians of middle-class America.

The truth is that if Jesus should be issued an I. D. card, he too would be described “Complexion: Brown,” like all the rest of us.—the Editor