In this piece I explore racial identity. To start, I stare down at my palms. I am labeled "white." But the skin on my palms is close to the same color as a "black" person's palms.
As I ponder these things I am allowing myself to wonder like a child. Here are my childlike questions that I am daring to discover....
If we all came from Adam and Eve.... how did we get to looking so different? Why do black people and brown people and white people all have the same colored palms and feet? How come everyone's finger prints are different? Why do I feel like I will get "shushed" for asking these kinds of questions?
I think back to how I looked at the world as a child. My mom tells me a story about a time when I was a toddler and she scolded me in the grocery store for crying out..." Mommy, look at that fat man!" Now I understand why! My poor mom must have been so embarrassed! I am a mom now, and one of my toddlers loudly proclaimed in a grocery store, "Mommy, that man's skin is black!" I had a quick mom panic moment,.... what to say? It was just a fact, and I didn't want the man to think that his skin was a bad thing.. so instead of shushing my toddler, I said, in my normal volume, "I know! isn't it beautiful? God made so many beautiful people!"
I think that the reason we don't talk about race is because we have been sold the idea that one color is better than the other. We are embarrassed by our differences and we don't point them out because it is considered a negative thing. This is a concept propagated in our schools by the theory of evolution and Darwinist thought. If you believe that there is a hierarchy of evolution with apes at the bottom and Caucasians at the top, it makes us all out to be animals. Conversely, we are told in the Bible that we are ALL created in the image of God, that we are equal at the foot of the cross, and we are all family. I do realize that in the past the church has propagated racism, and I am saddened and confounded at this history. I hope that in the future we as the church will see God's heart for all of His beautiful people.
The Biblical account of creation connects us all to our earthly parents Adam and Eve who must have had very diverse and very adaptable DNA. As I read articles by various scientists I find that the differences in colors might have come from levels of sunlight in different regions of the world and how they interact with vitamin D and the production of melanin in our cells. Such a small thing to cause such a great divide.
As I layer my canvas, forming deep ridges, I research how fingerprints are made. It is not just genetic, our skin wrinkles in the womb as it grows, influenced by gravity and pressure points. That is why no two prints are exactly the same. I run my fingers over the ridges and feel a connection to the rest of the world, to each baby, and their growth inside the wombs of earth's mothers.
As I decide what color to paint this finger print I discover that palms and soles are made of a thicker skin that doesn't have melanin in it, so it is lighter and doesn't tan. I want to include everyone in this painting so I mix up all shades of browns and beiges, tans and taupes and layer them together in a mashup of melanin to trace my open palm atop the ridges. I am leaving my mark, proof of this connection and this part of my journey on my quest to understand.
-Deborah King