"Bigotry is a triumph of the imagination over both fact and common sense. Actual people, in fact, just complicate matters."
Richard Cohen

"How many are your deeds, though hidden from sight, O Sole God beside whom there is none! You made the earth as you wished, you alone, all peoples, herds, and flocks...you set every man in his place, you supply their needs; everyone has his food, his lifetime is counted. Their tongues differ in speech, their characters likewise; their skins are distinct, for you distinguished the peoples....for you made them for yourself, Lord of all who toils for them, Lord of all lands who shines for them, Aten of daytime, great in glory!"
from Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV)'s Great Hymn to the Aten

I was going out to visit my parents with a friend a couple of weeks ago. We came upon the lone "blinker" -- a one-light traffic signal in the little Michigan town my parents call home, and he slowed the car and turned to me in confusion.

"What color is it, red or yellow?" he asked.

"Yellow," I answered, thinking it a strange question to ask, and then remembering: my friend is colorblind. Unless the light had three signals, like most traffic lights do, he wouldn't be able to tell a red from a yellow, from a green. He honestly didn't know whether to go or stop.

In driving, colorblindness can be a distinct liability. In fact, it can keep a person from operating certain types of vehicles entirely. But in the rest of our lives, I wonder how useful of a trait it might be to have?

In the United States in particular, we have an uncomfortable conscience of "color" in the sense of ethnic backgrounds. While most people classify this as "racism," I refuse to. There's one race: the human race. Doesn't matter what color your skin is or whether your parents came from Senegal, Tokyo or Omaha, you're still a human being.

For some reason, color has become a controversy regarding ancient Egypt. Some people will tell you with all sincerity that all ancient Egyptians, from the Predynastic Period to Nisut Cleopatra VII, were white. They will add that they were white because they came from somewhere in Europe or Asia, swooping down from the northeast to save those poor silly African (read: black) savages from their own stupidity, those silly savages who were wandering around with bones in their noses rubbing sticks together waiting for fire. Bigotry.

Other people will tell you with the same amount of sincerity that all the ancient Egyptians were black and the only reason that there are white people in Egypt today is because the evil nasty Muslims and Christians who came in later (read: white people) kicked all the black people out. If you ask what happened to the blacks who were displaced by the whites, they don't always have an answer, though the most amusing ones I've heard were that they were all sold as slaves to other countries or even that they were all killed, every single last one of them down to the lowliest babe, and that explains why nobody understands "the real truth about ancient Egypt." More bigotry.

Given that no country on the entire Earth, to my knowledge, has ever been blessed, or cursed, with a population that had exactly the same skin color from person to person through the millennia, and given that I am unaware of any people on the planet at all who are truly "black" or "white" (ranges from a very deep brown to a pasty pinky-beige seem to do it, unless my color sensors are off), either scenario is a little hard to swallow on the first offering. So I delve deeper, curmudgeon that I am, to find out why people believe these things, and what they offer as their proofs toward the "facts" they claim to present.

The answers I get, interestingly enough, are generally lacking in "proof" in the scientific sense we would expect to be put forward in academic or scientific disciplines, though some engage in pseudoscience (for example, recently I read something on a newsgroup that implied the reason AIDS is rampant in Africa has something to do with the "proven fact" that black men produce more testosterone than white men. This person has already thoroughly been taken to task, so there's no need for me to destroy the argument here, other than to say this is truly ridiculous and along the lines of Jimmy the Greek's comments a few years ago that only black men can be superior athletes).

Folks on the "all white" side of the ancient Egyptian color argument overly Westernize Egyptian history, claiming native Africans (by which they mean black people, though it has been "proven" scientifically and by anybody with two eyes that the continent of Africa consists of people in many, many skin colors) were not sufficiently "civilized" to have come up with the things they did by themselves. This also came from a lack of understanding of the Predynastic Period. Before anybody studied the Predynastic Period in any capacity, it was believed Egypt's culture burst out, like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully grown and without prologue. So the only logical answer for these folks was to say that culture must have come from outside. Today, most self-respecting people have read enough of more recent studies to realize the "dynastic race" theory, as it is often called, is a load of hogwash. However, some people perpetuate their bigotry in another insidious form: suggesting that maybe the "help" didn't come from white men, but "gods" or "enlightened beings" or "lightworkers" from Atlantis or some other legendary, multidimensional, or extraterrestrial source...who for some inexplicable (bigoted) reason, are generally white.

Folks on the "all black" side of the argument seem more emotional than those on the "all white" side, probably because many of them are speaking from cultural problems of modern times, where an entire ethnic group in the United States lives without a heritage beyond their parents or grandparents, in many cases, and has no way at all of ever being able to substantiate it. Many in the Afrocentric movement, including the late Marcus Garvey, who in many ways is its father, have legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to claim Egypt as part of their heritage; and many of those same people cite the above group as "reason" for needing to claim it -- "white men took my birthright, but they aren't going to take my ancestors."

While this is a very real, and very important, process of reclaiming history, there is such a thing as taking it too far. Last year, I heard a discussion of a new Afrocentric curriculum being presented to the Philadelphia school system. The "noted Afrocentrist" being interviewed, whom I had never heard of even though he was "noted" and I do make an attempt to keep informed of these things, told the interviewer about how the ancient Egyptians were all black, the direct ancestors of all black-skinned persons in the United States today, and were the founders of every culture and every technological advance which had ever been given to the world anywhere. When the interviewer asked for specifics, the speaker told how the pyramids were built -- with special levitational powers that the ancient Egyptians possessed, allowing them to fly themselves, and other objects, around at will simply by using their minds. When pressed, the speaker admitted the Egyptians lost their ability to fly and all their other incredible powers when "the white man invaded."

"You honestly believe the ancient Egyptians knew how to fly and move pyramid blocks with their minds?" asked the interviewer. "And you want to teach African-American schoolchildren this?"

The speaker paused, then said: "Well, no, I don't really believe they knew how to fly, and I don't believe they had any special powers. But we've got to give these kids something good to believe in, don't we?"

Here is the pitfall of either argument about the color of ancient Egypt, and its crux. For some reason, in our current culture, we have concluded we must "prove" ourselves: we seem to suffer from such a lack of self-esteem that we will do anything at all, even rewrite history to our liking, to justify ourselves. Some people claim Egypt was built by aliens so that they don't have to admit Africans did it. Others claim the ancient Egyptians knew how to fly so they can give black schoolchildren "something to believe in."

Neither side does anything to get us any closer to the truth, and if anything, the "facts" of the case become more deeply obscured in what we want to believe about ancient Egypt, as opposed to what is true. Why would it matter if all the ancient Egyptians were one color or the other? Why would it honestly matter? Would it make a difference in one schoolchild's life to know that Ramses II had red hair or black? Does it matter what color Nisut Thutmose III was? Does it matter what color Napoleon was? Does it matter what color Colin Powell is? Or does it matter that they won their wars and defended their countries? What's the real argument here, and will solving it do anything for the question?

Given that the answer, as in many things which present themselves initially in extremes, probably lies somewhere in the middle, I doubt we will have any resolution soon. For now, I'm content to look at the Egyptians as Egyptians, which, ironically, seems to have been their inclination too. In fact, if the ancient texts are to be believed, the ancients believed linguistic, cultural and color differences are intentional parts of the divine plan: "for He created them for Himself." In some ways, we have a lot to learn from this sort of mentality, where plurality is a manifestation of the glory of the Creator, and colorblindness can be a virtue.

Off-Site Links for Further Reading:
Race: Is It a Valid Issue?