Micah Bhachech, Campus Carrier Copy Editor

I’ve been told that I don’t look like the kind of person who likes rap music. I do. When white people learn that about me, sometimes they say things to me like, “I didn’t know you were so black.” I think they mean that as a compliment.

I’m not offended by that kind of statement, but I think that it is generally offensive. Being called “black” isn’t a bad thing in itself; however, the assertion implicit in a statement like that is the basis of racism and intolerance in general.

Before I develop more what I mean about, it’s important that we realize how prevalent this kind of thinking is, how it has invaded our language.

I went to high school with a guy from Zambia. He hung out with white people (there weren’t many other options in my high school frankly), didn’t like basketball and worked at Starbucks. I heard lots of people describe Nathan as “the whitest black guy” they knew.

I was listening to my iPod once and rapping along. Goofy hand motions were involved. A friend saw me, and I think he said that it was “the whitest I’d ever looked,” or something similar.

The problem with using the adjectives “black” and “white” in those kinds of ways is that it reinforces the idea that there is a fundamental, intrinsic difference between black people and white people.

I don’t want to suggest that we ought to ignore important historical and cultural facts. Black people in America have a painful history of marginalization and abuse that the white majority was largely responsible for. And that kind of racism and division is, unfortunately, not extinct; it would be stupid to ask you to pretend that those painful facts are not realities.

However, when we use language that attributes to “blackness” something more than race, we subconsciously assent to the idea that the difference between black and white delves deeper than our skin. By referring to someone’s “blackness” or “whiteness” as anything other than a distinction in pigment concentration, we assert that there is a divisive difference between the races, that neither is simply human. Instead a black person can conform or fail to conform to the external standard for what “black” is.

Conformity to that standard means that the white majority can accurately identify the black person as fundamentally different from themselves, thereby justifying injustice and racism. Contrarily, nonconformity means that “black culture” or those who do conform to the “black” standard will identify an outsider and criticize him for not being “black enough.”

That idea, that external standard that attempts to explain what it means to belong to a particular race, is a fiction, a construct that does nothing for our society but help us alienate one another. It is only possible to “act black” or be “too white” because we have allowed those words to become shallow excuses to avoid meaningfully engaging with an individual. Instead we apply to them our preconceptions of what “blackness” and “whiteness” mean.

That kind of prejudice, that attempt to oversimplify the infinite complexity of each individual is of course not limited to something that white people do to black people or vice versa. We consistently oversimplify, assuming that modifiers like “gay” or “Mexican” communicate not just aspects of an individual but convey everything about the individual.

Perhaps I attribute too much significance to word choice, but I think that if we actively change the way that we talk about people, no longer using those kinds of easy, lazy and inaccurate adjectives, we can know people of all kinds on a deeper level more free of our own preconceptions of how they “ought” to be based on race or something equally trivial. Labels like that will always become borders between people and facilitate alienation and prejudice.