The color line’s fixed categories dissolve when people are neither purely white nor black.
Evidence
We forever confused the color line and exposed the sheer stupidity of that dark dividing line that made some people white and others black. Black? They were light or dark chocolatey brown. White? They were yellowish or pinkish, not white. White? Kaqaz-e espid e na-benveshteh bash—we began teaching the Persian that Rumi wrote and spoke: “O brother be an unwritten blank page of paper.” As on paper, so on human beings can just about anything be written. We the unwritten, we began to write ourselves, in jest, in gestures, in frivolity, with gesticulations that mocked the seriousness of the color line. “The problem of the twentieth century,” wrote W. E. B. Dubois, “is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the seas.” Not anymore, not in the twenty-first century. We have made sure of it. We colorful folks confuse the color line, so that white and black folks no longer know which is which, for we are neither, we are both. We are full and free of color. We are free. We the unwritten blank pages of ourselves, waiting to be written and read by the posterity we have bred in this world—our children, — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 654
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Du Bois’ ‘color line’ from The Souls of Black Folk and to Rumi’s metaphor of the unwritten page — Dabashi here resignifies both for a postcolonial diasporic identity.
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that being ‘neither white nor black’ but ‘both’ actively confuses and destabilizes the binary is a dense, paradigm-shifting idea about how racial categories are made and unmade through lived multiplicity, not just asserted.