This article is about how the color of our skin changes how people think about us.

Early in one's life, being able to understand what color is is simple enough. The sky is blue, the grass is green, dirt and earth are all kinds of brown and red, the night sky is black, bananas are yellow and oranges are orange. Simple! And when you learn about geography and history, you can describe people in certain ways too. People from France are French, people from Africa are African, people from Mexico are Mexican, people from China are Chinese, and people from the United States are Americans. Simple again. Aside from some subtle differences in our eyes that physically allow us to see a different spectrum of color, there's not much confusion or conflicting information here yet, everything is simple. It's when we start questioning who we are, it's when we start meeting diverse kinds of people and learning more history that things stop becoming so simple. Things start to become complicated, and it wasn't soon after my teen years began that I really started to wonder how complicated the issues of race, ethnicity, and history could be.

I myself have a brown-type color on my skin. My ancestry is mostly Mexican, and for a while that was enough for me to be comfortable with everything about myself. I didn't question the way I looked, and I didn't even know enough to question. But it wasn't too long ago that I learned about what science has to say about skin color. Simply enough, science says that the color of our skin is genetic; that is, that its inherited due to the living factors of our ancestors. In a general setting, the skin color of any human being is determined by the geography in which they lived and their genealogy.

But because the colors of our skin can vary so differently in shades and tones, humans have been classified by skin color. After all, the human mind naturally over time becomes more inclined to create a taxonomy, an ontology, to classify and categorize information.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I would hear people talk about "white people" and us "brown people" and that we were treated similarly to "black people". It's simple enough of an idea, that our choice of words describe people. I learned that we call people from Europe "white", people from Africa "black" and people from Latin America "brown". We don't call Asians "yellow" that much anymore, but there was a time when that was popular, and even today, many (East) Asians are depicted in illustrations with a yellow skin tone of color. But eventually, this simple code would be challenged when I would study geography and ethnic groups more closely. I would learn that there were plenty of "brown" people in Southern Europe and Southern Asia, and well as Northern Asia. There are also plenty of "black" people in India, and not as many in North Africa as the rest of Africa, for example.

There were two situations in my mind that would surface these thoughts in mind, and those two things were the books that I would read in school and the dialogues that my parents and family friends would have about people. I can recall family (as well as TV and movies) speaking about how "white people" think that they're better than us "brown" people, and truthfully, I was too kind or naive to want to believe such things. In fact, it would be years before I would travel anywhere that was mostly "white". But throughout school, we learned about the slavery times in the United States, and eventually, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. This all happened in middle school, too, which was perhaps too young of an age to really understand any of this. But I myself began to form my ideas of how my culture related to those around me and around the world, ties from history into the modern world. Sometimes I would feel angry, upset, or intimidated by other colors of people based on the stories that I would hear about the past experiences of people that I associated with. But the more history I read, the more I realized it wasn't as much of what I thought of other people; I could be myself and just live by what I feel on the inside, but what was important was what others what see when they would see me.

The main thing on my mind related to how others behaved based on their ideas of what color meant; I was thinking of course, about discrimination. I learned that all throughout history, there were stories of discrimination just based off of the color of people's appearance. Truly, history is a story that features a lot of xenophobia, fear and retaliation out of anxiety of the strange and unfamiliar.

I was also curious when discrimination was racism, and when it wasn't. Many times I would hear someone say, "that isn't a race, it's a nationality", or "that isn't a nationality, that's an ethnicity". In some confusing cases, someone's identity would be called by the language that they would speak. For example, at first glance, some people in the United States might refer to a brown skinned black haired individual as Spanish, to mean that they come from the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas. But, at the same time, "Spanish" is what many others would call white skinned blonde haired people from Spain.

Aside from just the aesthetic that someone has, there are the public image and the ideas that we associate with the way someone looks. Here's the tricky part: people are no longer defined by how they look in today's world, and they almost never really were.

Today's the world has become so connected, that anyone that's someone else can look like anyone else. What I mean is that almost anyone today can match the idea of a certain group of people that we have in mind. We usually think of a Mexican as brown skinned and a Swedish person as pale skinned; but because of immigration and travel, the two roles can become reversed. We usually think of people from Latin America speaking Spanish or Portuguese, but there are hundreds of thousands that speak neither. Here in the United States, we usually refer to black people as African American, but many are just African. And with 54 countries in Africa and hundreds of different ethnicities and thousands of different languages, the appearance and idea of a "typical African" to non-African minds will soon be challenged.

In fact, that goes for beyond Africa as well; all around the world, there exist thousands of different features among billions of different people, each generation being more and more unique. Everyone has a different understanding of history and politics, but the reality is, history is continuing every day, and the identities and complexity behind stereotypes are only going to further become mixed and blended as more people travel and form unique relationships. Our ideas of the past can only last so long until we begin to learn more about other people and their experiences. That will be where our ideas of color are truly challenged.