50 Shades of a grey area...

Since the dawn of time, the distinction between good and evil has always been ambiguously implied. The use of black and white to represent cultural ideologies of pure and evil have been around for centuries. As time goes on, will we see a shift between the conative elements of each? Or will these meanings forever cast a negative shadow on race?

Codell states that ‘white and black are being used as cultural metaphors of good and bad.’ This theory can go beyond culture and seep into the structure of how we perceive and use the very colours themselves. Through various media, we have been conditioned to see race as a skin colour and more importantly, colour as a conative element of a race. Society has constructed these boundaries so that we can morally practice what constitutes a good person and what constitutes as a bad one.

From as far back as the 16^th century white started out as connoting mostly positive things to older generations. The focus was on white as the image of power, purity and dominance in political and social situations. Where as it may not be so obviously epitomized in modern society, the problem is that its lasting impact is subconscious. We think of these colours as ‘ying and yang,’ binary oppositions that have exclusive meanings attached. You can’t know what is evil till you understand the depiction of good and vice versa. Therefore our experiences with them in social settings can be damaging not only to our own understandings but also to the representation of race in general.

As time has gone on, being ‘white’ has created its own stereotype through destructive and detrimental actions to other cultural communities (Apartheid, Hitler, Aboriginal genocide.) In the 21^st century, white no longer connotes purity, it screams racism. It no longer focuses on power and success but instead corruption and deceit. When people see the colour white in certain contexts they just roll their eyes. The generalisation of a particular race due to certain shared physical or socio-cultural attributes is considered racism no matter who is involved. Now I’m not jumping on the bandwagon of pitying all white people because history has caught up to them. I am simply highlighting the fluidity of inferential racism and the regressive quality that the ‘an eye for an eye’ philosophy can have on any society.

Suzanne mentioned in the lecture the concept of racial blindness, a theory where you disregard racial characteristics of a person for the sake of ‘true equality.’ Can we truly surpass the visual elements of race when they are continually reinforced through mass media? If so, there remains much ambiguity around the progressive nature of this technique. Would starting from scratch effectively discount the history of slavery or basic inequality? Many questions arise when we look at race with a blind eye because we cannot comprehend it effectively without the history of socio-cultural advancement being heavily significant. How can we move forward with equality if the past is so strongly controlling the present?