There are few feelings that ever rivaled breaking open the seal of your brand new crayon box as a primary school student. No more borrowing crayons from the other kids at school. You could finally use any colour you wanted: Carnation Pink, Sky Blue, Brick Red. The anxiety of being stuck with the five most unwanted, useless colours to have ever existed in the Crayola world was gone.
Brown. Black. Yellow. Red. White. With so many different colours to choose from, these five colours seemed boring and ugly in comparison. So, who felt the need to categorize seven billion human beings — all with distinct, individual cultures — into five of the most disliked crayon colours of our youth?
Identifying people by their colour minimizes and marginalizes their individual identities.
To be clear, I’ve never been personally offended by someone calling me “brown”; I suspect this is because the term has become normalized in our society. I myself have been using the term casually for years.
But a conversation I had with my cousin from Manchester, who uses “Asian” to refer to the same group of people we North Americans refer to as “brown,” made me question the terms I use in my everyday life. Is it right to identify individuals by a colour, even if those terms don’t paint a complete picture?
“As long as your character is what precedes you, I’m okay with being called a black guy,” says Kayode Fatoba, an Health Science student at SFU. “Black is beautiful, I’m black and I’m proud . . . Calling me Kayode is much cooler, though.”
Colour labels might serve a beneficial purpose. I am Punjabi. It is the only ethnic label I feel proud and honoured to identify with. I was born in Punjab, India. Both my parents are Punjabi. But if I were given a list of countries and asked to check where I was born, I would be forced to check the box next to India.
Sovereign states are the foundation of our current global political economy and, therefore, have a monopoly on their citizens’ identities. If people used nationalities to describe individuals instead of colours in our society, I would be labelled an “Indian” and forcibly be identified with a state that has intentionally made a point of oppressing my people both historically and presently.
The label “brown” serves a purpose here: it doesn’t limit my identity within a political border, and allows me to fill in the blanks of my ethnicity myself.
Chantal Chow, a Communications major at SFU, struggles with a similar issue. Both of her parents are from Hong Kong, and if people were to refer to each other by their ancestral nationalities, she would most likely be labelled “Chinese.” According to Chantal, this label would not express her identity correctly, because there is a deeply embedded and significant reason for making a distinction between Hong Kong and China.
She’d prefer to be recognized as Canadian first since she was both born here and holds Canadian citizenship.
Taking this into consideration, using a colour to describe an individual transcends our traditional sovereign state system and avoids mistaking someone’s nationality or their preferred regional identity.
But is defying the traditional state system with the use of a broad and overly-generic colour-coding system a form of rebellion, or just laziness?
According to Mariam Hanjra, a Psychology major at SFU, labels, nationalities, and colour are not the best way to break down boundaries. Where someone is born or where their parents were born is not an accurate representation of their identity. As someone who is half-Pakistani and half-Filipino, Mariam knows all too well the problems with putting someone in the most convenient colour category, and ignoring a part of their identity in the process.
Identifying people by their colour or nationality is meant to be efficient, but that efficiency comes at the cost of minimizing and marginalizing an individual’s identity. After all, when you call me “brown,” what insights have you gained about me and my family? About who I am as a person?
We’re so much more than colours in a box. It’s time our language reflects that.
The colour-coding system also ignores specific ethnic groups and their historical struggle for independence and a sense of identity. The “white” category carries a strong stigma, along with all the other colour categories I’ve discussed. Imperialism, colonialism, and privilege are almost exclusively associated with the white race. In our society, however, we have conglomerated almost every country in the “Global North” under this banner of whiteness.
By continuing to use “white” to describe the Irish, for example, we effectively ignore the very crucial and significant history of the Irish people. According to Jess Furney, a Criminology student at SFU, who is half Irish, “To be fully alright with being defined by such an all-encompassing term seems a contradiction, and suggests disrespect to my family’s ancestry and circumstance in their fight against British exploitation, famine, and the like.”
So I ask you again: Is it right to identify individuals by a colour, or by their ancestral nationality?
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s not primary school anymore, so why settle for such a limited colour palette? It may be more difficult to look past our system of categorization to see the person beneath, but it’s worth doing so. We live in a world bursting at the seams with culture and individuality — using simplified terms to describe ourselves only serves to minimize our diversity.
We’re so much more than colours in a box. It’s time our language reflects that.
If you are looking to capture someone’s identity, as in all their personality traits and background history, in one word it’s not likely to happen whether it’s a colour, nationality or trait. If you are trying to identify one person in another room to someone else and everyone in the other room is light skinned and the one you want to identify, as in make clear which person you are talking about, is dark skinned, it just seems PC madness not to use the easily identifiable trait to make that clear.