Why Are You Brown?

I just watched this video:

What stood out to me was Taha’s succinctly put, “why are you brown?” That is ultimately the question, isn’t it? And it’s taking a step further. The question behind that is “why are you different than me?”

Humanity’s desire to classify, well, everything is what leads to these questions. What does that classification yield? What do you gain?

Quite a bit, I think. But not enough to justify the invasion of privacy, the rudeness that can accompany such questions, or the assumption that the person asking is entitled to a response. If you don’t care about the person as an individual, then why are you asking the question? And if you do then, why aren’t you asking something about them as an individual? When I am interested enough in a person to learn more about their cultural background, I ask them very specific questions. I am not going to list any here because this is a the publicly available blog and it feels like giving people an excuse to ask the same question in a different way.

What I think is most important is to interrogate the reason for asking such a question. And it’s something that each person who may consider asking needs to ask themselves. Namely, why do you care? Why does it matter? Do you actually care? Does it actually matter?

xoxo