Sunday, December 30, 2007 Sun.star Essay: Color of man By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
SOME years back in a ride towards the suburbs of Sydney, I watched men working on one side of the road, drilling. “Look, Filipinos!” I exclaimed. “They do hire Asians to do road work here, don’t they?”
My sister and her husband didn’t say a word. So I looked again and I realized I was looking at Australian laborers (originally white!) now with skin made dark from working too often under the Australian summer sun late in the year.
Balikbayans from the US on visits here are seen by relatives as having grown fairer than ever, or are they seeing things?
But the world is really getting smaller, the colors mixing, showing more and more obviously that we are only one race, no matter the shade. The whites in Asia would eventually change color according to the environment. It’s said that skin color has nothing to do with inherited culture but is the result of the effect in man of the atmosphere he has chosen to live in at the beginning of time.
The Bible says there’s only one human race. In fact, in ancient times, skin color in relation to races wasn’t anything to talk about. There was no racial prejudice, whether in color or in the differences of culture. And certainly, there was no law passed by any Roman politician forbidding intermarriages of different races or color, or preventing immigration from any one country by closing the gates.
In ancient times, according to most sources, Egyptians then were referred to as black. Greek historian Herodotus said they were "dark-skinned and woolly-haired." But they were white…so complain others.
A recent AP news item about whites now being a minority in 1 out of 10 American counties talks about a new racial tension over there, especially because of increase in illegal immigration, and also with more Blacks and Hispanics on a birthing binge.
The matter of skin color became an issue only about 200 years ago. Today, if a painter would produce an image of an Egyptian emperor, he would have to guess his color or bring on a debate.
In fact, there’s this King Tut (Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen) exhibit which has elicited different reactions as to the color of his skin. Some say he was black, others say he was white.
What came out was the theory that in Tut’s time, Egyptians mostly had very dark skin, like Africans are. But during the debate, anthropologist author Nina Jablonski said that “our best guess is that he (Tut) was probably neither lily white nor ebony black. He was probably somewhere in between.” In other words, he was like modern Egyptians---some Arabic-looking, others African, the happy mix attributed to the Nile River which allowed frequent contacts of people.
It’s just like the way climate and environment could have helped develop the outward color or shaped the cultures of people who at the outset were one race.
Ancient people about 100,000 years ago migrated out of Africa into the rest of the world, adapting to their new environments, perhaps undergoing pigmentation changes.
In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the world broke up into “races” along the diversity of culture as soon as God punished men for trying to reach heaven through a physical structure. Suddenly men and women found themselves in a “confusion of tongues.” People must have turned into clusters of strangers, each group unable to understand the other. Imagine them walking apart from the Tower, into some strange far places on earth.
And now the world is trying to get back together again, mixing color, as people in one tower. On one true celebration of the Epiphany, it will happen, no matter what color.
