“Color Wheel”

I used to dream in color. I used to believe we were all one person, separated only by the content of our character and the warmth in our hearts.

But I am black. Not representative of those living in hundreds of years of oppression, but of the oppressor that manages to put them six [thousand] feet under in the first place.

I used to believe the color wheel represented a universal language. But things are never as they seem, and our appearance has deceived us into a civil war.

The color wheel: once a symbol of hope and light too bright to be overshadowed by hatred, now a symbol of systematic oppression and segregation.

Red: fear, danger, blood; a race slaughtered by the hands of imperialism, pushed off their lands, rights butchered by a people they used to trust. No reservation can contain their culture and no single act can make up for 80 million lives taken by the disease of ambition.

Orange: joy, warmth, change; things seemingly impossible to come by when we value the media’s opinion over the lives of those lost, when we jump to our corners and fight over the cause instead of the solution

Yellow: caution, weakness, determination; banning an entire nation because entitlement outlasted the assimilation of those whose backs were encased in concrete, stomped on by the foot of nativism.

Green: conservatism, self-reliance, envy; one of seven in our nation are unable to read my thoughts while five of seven will choose to ignore them; 24th in literacy, 17th in educational performance, 11th in fourth grade math, 1st in incarceration.

Blue: order, stability, loyalty; at some point the decision was made that the only way to stop injustice was to direct it towards another race; now five men, five bodies, five lives will never be able to heal the damage others caused

Purple: dreams, royalty, wealth; an everlasting battle between polar opposites, one too greedy to give up, one too dependent to give in, and an outlier constantly caught in the middle.

White: pure, good, empty; the color we aspire to be, not for delusions of grandeur, of white supremacy, of despotism, but for pure, untainted love, of four major races bleeding the same color, of bulletproof ideas and refusing the boundaries set to cage us in, of unity achieving the impossible.

Black: death, darkness, destruction; not for those whose pure skin have never forgotten the marks behind the cracking whip, not for the body of Eric Garner, whose hand still grasps Trayvon and Tamir, bullets becoming headlines, not for a race but a for a twisted representation of who we all have become.

I used to believe the color wheel represented a universal language. But things are never as they seem, and our primary colors have become primary perpetrators in this civil war we have plunged into.