If we close our eyes, will the perspective change?

Everyone goes through a sort of “search for identity” or “search for self”, it’s part of growing up. Part of finding where your piece fits among this jigsaw called life. The only problem with all this searching is know what it is you are looking for. Sometimes the things that make you you are the most basic attributes about yourself that you seem to overlook. The easiest way to discover what differentiates you from others is to surround yourself by polar opposite personalities. Only then will you take notice to the overlooked traits that set the frame work for who you are.

This is what happens to Lily in The Secret Life of Bee’s and Zora in How It Feels to be Colored Me. While Lily is white and Zora colored, they do share a rather similar story. The two of them have both been faced with situations foreign to anything they had experience previously. In Zora’s case it is when she moves from her home town on Eatonville, Florida. Moving showed her what it was really like to be colored in a white man’s world. The whole concept perplexed her because she had never imagined such things, being as she was from a colored only community.  For the first time in her lifetime Zora had become known as colored. Lily stumbles upon a similar issue when she moves in with the Calendar Sisters. There are various accounts where Lily is left out or is given the cold shoulder merely because she is white. Lily had never before been the minority. She too was beginning to feel what it was like to be singled out. As both stories continue, the girls battle with self-identification. But as the tales reach their end the bigger picture is seen. They begin to see that color is nothing more than what our eyes perceive.
I have felt the very same way as the girls above—that feeling of not knowing where you are or how you fit into the picture. It’s exactly how I felt when I moved out here to New Berlin. I went from a school where whites were the minority and classes where taught in Spanish to a school of predominantly whites and was to call my teacher Miss or Misses. I felt like everyone was staring at me because I wasn't a cookie cutter replica of them. I spent the year trying to be but it just wasn’t happening. Eventually, as I made friends, I realized they didn’t care that I was a little different than them. In fact it’s what they liked about me most.

So let’s stop being so focused on, not just race, but outward appearance in general. . If you were to talk to a blind man, he would not be able to discriminate based on a person’s skin color. It’s time we close our eyes and observe the world around us without visual contaminants.