If you did not hear my American accent, see the clothes on my body, the shoes on my feet and the car I drive, would you know I was American? If my hair was long, wavy and uncut and I had windows to the soul the color of timber logs and green forests, would you know I was African American? Or would you make judgments solely on my naked body and the color of my skin? In your eyes, I could be a few things, but would your best guess be African or better yet, would you get frustrated when I begin to reveal the several ethnicities that make me the man I am? Would you dispute my grandmother’s whiteness or my grandfather’s mother tongue of Italian simply because the color of my skin is black? Or would you come to terms with the facts of life and understand that at the very core of our existence, color is nothing more than ‘the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans.’ For although my color has kept you away from me in the past, let it no more.
-A Word from the New 'Man'
