So now let’s bring this idea closer to reality. When a young teenage adult sings along with the previous songs of Tupac, Ice Cube, Vanilla Ice or more recent artists like Lil Wayne and Trinidad James, does the individual ever stop to think about the “N” word that is in the song?, or does the young adolescent continue to sing along with the words without thinking about the social construct that has been placed on the word? The author of “Can We Talk about Race: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation,” Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, indicates that “In a society where racial group membership is still a meaningful social characteristic the development of racial identity is relevant to how our social connections are formed and maintained.”
But, what if everyone in the world was blind? From birth we would only possess four main senses, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Of course, without the sense of sight, our definition of a lot of things would change. Maybe the way we eat, maybe the way we sleep, maybe the way we clothe ourselves, maybe the way we talk or even... maybe the way we perceive each other, would change. Though with sight, an acknowledgeable aspect that is given is our perception of color, which unravels something deeper: our perception of each other, as author of “White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812,” Jordan Winthrop affirms:
Englishmen actually described Negroes as black-an exaggerated term which in itself suggests that the Negro’s complexion had powerful impact upon their perceptions. Even the peoples of northern Africa seemed so dark that Englishmen tended to call them “black” and let further refinements go by the board. Blackness became so generally associated with Africa that every African seemed a black man.
So, how could we explain color without sight? Without sight, would we even know what the word color means? Sight is defined as, “The power or faculty of seeing; perception of objects by use of the eyes; vision.”