racism is colorblind

My friend wants to kill me.
Why?
Because i'm white.
This isn't some acquaintance-come-lately, mind you. Penny and i have known each other for decades, and for most of that time we've shared profound intimacies.
Nor is she the homicidal type. She's a poet, journalist, and spiritual nurturer. I've never heard her raise her voice in anger.
We're differently pigmented, and talk about race issues often. We even wrote a play together about an interracial love affair, in which the lead characters were loosely based on us. She has certified me as an honorary black person, which i treasure more than any college degree.
Before i go further, let me say that i'm almost certainly misrepresenting her. I don't remember exactly what her words were. As she was speaking them, i let them flow off my back. Words can be so clumsy, especially when trying to enunciate conflicting, contradictory feelings. I was trying to hear only the spirit of her words. I didn't treat them as a big deal, because they weren't. I wasn't surprised at all (which may have surprised her). Did she say she "could" imagine killing me, or "had" imagined? Probably the former, but i wouldn't think less of her if it were the latter.
Of course she can imagine killing me.
She's black.
I'm white.
End of story.
If you'd like to believe that maya angelou or martin luther king never had any dreams of caucasiacide, then you've spent a lifetime avoiding the realities of this world we share - or rather, this world we refuse to share.
Especially maya. I wouldn't be surprised if she had actually gone ahead and offed a couple of whities - it's the quiet ones you've got to look out for.
I'm not speaking to you, by the way, as a white person. I stopped identifying with my skin, gender, or nationality a long time ago.
It's hard to imagine that penny now has any deep secrets left (but i wouldn't mind being surprised). Thanks to racism, it took only twenty-five years to unearth this one.
Forgive my stating the obvious, but these are confusing times. Or perhaps "confused" is the better word. We are all such a horrible mess of fearful, selfish, violent, superstitious social conditioning. Most of us don't have the first clue as to how broken we really are.
You think things are bad?
Child, things passed "bad" thousands of years ago. Things aren't bad, they're apocalyptically barbaric.
So i'm not here to sell hope. But if you find hope in what i'm about to say, that's fantastic.
Racism isn't natural. If humanity survives another century, that will be patently obvious.
How did american racism come about? Not easily, and not accidentally. Nor was it a creation of white people, it was a creation of rich people. Let's take a walk back in time. In the early years of american slavery, there were slave revolts. Most of us have at least a little awareness of that. But it's a shame we don't have a time machine, to go back and see these revolts. The visuals would be more unexpected and moving than words alone could ever be. Let "slave revolt" images flow through your mind - you're picturing a mass of brown-skinned people moving across the land, waving torches and pitchforks perhaps? Now freeze the image. Erase every fifth black person, and replace them with a white person, wearing, waving, and shouting the same things. Let the image play again.
That's better, isn't it? Still horrible, but better.
Who were those white people?
Indentured servants. Slaves in all but name. Penniless, white europeans who paid for their tickets to the new world with a contract signing away their lives. The only difference between an indentured servant and a slave was the awareness that seven years later (give or take) they'd be free. Otherwise...the housing, the food, the degradations, the beatings, the rapings, were often on par with the black slaves of the time.
If you were to live just one day under such conditions, not knowing if it was going to end, your life would never be the same.
When rich people saw what was happening in these revolts, they resorted to one of the most ancient strategies - divide and conquer. In order to shatter the natural sympathies between poor whites and slaves, they began a campaign of dehumanization. Using the social media of the time, they called blacks beasts and sub-humans, so that the now artificially-elevated poor white people would be less and less inclined toward the racial sister and brotherhood that had been natural to them.
Your white slaves are unhappy? Keep telling them they should be glad they're not a nigger, and eventually they'll believe it.
Racism isn't about color...unless you count the color green.
Now fast forward back to modern times. If you're still not convinced, let's let science pitch in its two cents. Sociologists have concluded that racism is not natural. It's possible that some sort of "us against them" tribalism is part of our nature, but even if so, it's quite colorblind in practical terms. Studies of large groups show this - the best example being the sports stadium. In a sea of humanity, if you wear the colors of a certain tribe (or "team"), you'll be accepted by others of that tribe, eagerly and unfailingly. People won't see skin differences.
Of course, penny may still kill me.
But that's only to be expected.
I've thought about keeping a photo in my wallet of her and i hugging, so that my life might one day be spared when a black death squad has me at gunpoint. But then i realized that the sight of a white man hugging a black woman might make a black man kill me even quicker. Then i thought about keeping a photo of me hugging my new friend mack, but the death squad might just conclude that i'm gay, and kill me for that.
And you wonder why i avoid money? With my skin and gender, i've already got two of the biggest death squad targets in the world.
If i were a rich white man, i might have to kill myself...just on general principle.