Paint

PAINT

Color Identity

                The Western Hemisphere, comprised of North and South America and the Caribbean, is the consequence of a violent clash between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples that occurred in newly discovered lands more than 500 years ago.  Technological advances in navigation made possible a spread of violence, practiced earlier by Europeans in the Middle East and Asia, to new lands and their aboriginal peoples in the West.  The decimation of the aboriginal peoples in a brutal slave system employed by the Spanish, in search of precious metals, led to the invention of the Tran-Atlantic slave trade.  Key players in the invention were the Catholic (at that time, the only Christian) Church leadership; both in Rome and Mexico, and the crowned heads of Spain.

The French, English, and Dutch were slow to catch up to the technology, but when they did, they used it to steal on the high seas the precious metals mined by the Spaniards, and to spread their agriculture to the new lands.  They profited initially through piracy, looting Spanish gold and silver, and, later, by directly importing to the new lands the free labor they could sell and work to death on Encomiendas and Plantations.  The Christian hierarchy proclaimed they acted to save the Aboriginal peoples from the death, destruction, and degradation under the first slave system, (encomiendas) they established.  They justified enslaving the Africans by their long-held beliefs that Africans were a mala raza, and natural slaves.  The slave system constructed for the African slaves became the most brutal and inhuman form of slavery in human history.

The portrait, so to speak, of the new  races produced by  the mixture of these three “buckets” of colors; European, ( or white), Aboriginal,( or red), and African,( or black),  was  painted,  by the Spaniards.  The famous sixteen paintings can be found in museums in Mexico and depict the evolution of what is referred to today as the Mestizo races that dominate the Western Hemisphere. 

The white “bucket” has maintained its dominance in law, in faith, and in custom for more than five hundred years.   It has used government and religion to maintain superiority in all things legal, economic, religious, and social.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the most enduring power is that of the white group to define the existence, image, voice, and social status of the non-white groups in the Americas.   In the state of Missouri, where I was born in the late 1930’s, I was first designated by law as “Negro”.

By custom, we were described in print media as “Colored”.  In the early 1970’s President Nixon decreed through OMB that all U.S. citizens be “fitted” into 5 boxes, largely by skin color.  Over the span of my lifetime, all matters involving race were legislated and enforced by government.

                The persistence of this evil may be coming finally to an end.  Technology, as in the beginning, is the catalyst for the termination of this curse invented by Europeans.  As a student of Peter Drucker in the 1980’s I learned that governments copied early religion, and controlled the governed by limiting their access to information.  With the invention of the internet (one of many scientific breakthroughs achieved during the process of the “Cold War”), we are witnessing the end of governments’ ability to wield such power.  As people learn to better use this technology to communicate directly, those whose identities were the “property” of white-led governments can break those chains and claim their history.

                By controlling and manipulating the identity of non-white peoples in the Americas, governments have destroyed family links, distorted human images, denied human voice, and perpetuated a sense of inferiority; with its concomitant debilitating behaviors.  Freedom from these legal and psychological chains will become essential for the persons condemned by this system to become fully productive in their own lives and in society.   Hundreds of millions of citizens of the Americas are trapped in a system that assigns the worst attributes to those designated as black and the best to those designated as white.  Those in between are conditioned to be “thankful –they- are -not -black”.  These “non-blacks” are bound by the “non-obtainium” to achieve white status, and the fear of being designated as black.  This limbo, inherited at birth, could be the major cause that ”racism” gets blamed instead of “white supremacy” ;  why individuals bear the brunt of racial strife and not governments or religion; and why “racism” never goes away in  spite of hundreds of years of effort to make it disappear.

                Social networking, appropriately applied, through the technology of the world-wide-web may just be the key to a totally new world full of rich portent far beyond the gold and silver that drove the motivations of the inventors of this Paint Curse.

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