Ideally, I would want to be color-indifferent. Realistically, I strive for color-blindness. Currently, I am neither.

It took some brainwashing to get here. Living in West Africa, color was never really a big issue. But West Africans are human, and we need to discriminate too. So instead of racism, we invented tribalism. There’s the smart tribe, the dumb tribe, the hard-working tribe, the lazy tribe, the money-hungry tribe, and the cold, ruthless tribe. And naturally, one tribe that is unanimously blamed for life's many injustices: the "master" tribe.

So it’s not uncommon to witness fights along tribal lines, and deaths resulting from them. Certain tribes get picked on, while others get all the breaks. Inter-tribal relationships are generally frowned upon, though, secretly, some would view marriage to a "master" tribe member as "moving up." Sometimes it seems as if tribal lines are all everybody thinks about, as if what tribe a person belongs to is more significant than who that person is.

Until you come to America.

Living in a culture that doesn't recognize such sub-divisions, or value their significance, dampens our obsession with the issue. On the rare occasion that I’ve asked a fellow African what tribe he/she belonged to, their reply was a genuinely confused, "Why?" As if the question was just silly.

So now I’m tribal-indifferent. As are most Africans in America. Because tribalism just seems silly.

But to many Americans, racism doesn't seem silly, and as a black person, I have gotten caught up in the whole sorry spectacle. It runs my life to the point that race has become an essential adjective, and the first thing I notice when I meet someone of a different ethnicity: "I was at the mall when this Asian woman...", "Guess what, this White guy..." By using the person's color or race, I have saved myself the time of having to say anything else. Race is descriptive enough. I am color-conscious.

But as I surround myself with more people of different races it becomes harder to rely upon the pre-conceptions. And recently I have found myself omitting the generalizations, opting instead to use more individual characteristics: "cute", "smart-as-heck", "dumb-as-dirt". Exposure is gradually nudging race out of my descriptions. It’s beginning to seem less significant. I am learning, and the more I learn, the less I see. I am becoming color-blind.

But even under the darkness of color-blindness, I think I will still be able to sense it. It’s one thing to see color and disregard it; it's another to be ignorant of its significance. Just as many in this country wouldn’t know the significance of, or appreciate the differences between various African tribes, the most ideal state would be color-indifference -- a level at which one can neither see color, nor understand it. A level at which the concept of color seems silly.

Just as it did before I came here.

I'm striving for color-blind; that should be enough. Besides, my vision has been tainted. It's going to take a heck of a lot to make me forget what I know. Even in Africa, there are enough races there now to sustain me.

To forget, I would have to go to a place where race and color have no meaning at all. Somewhere far. Like the moon. Or another galaxy.

Or the internet.

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