March 22, 2016

I Don’t Want to be Color Blind. For SheLoves Magazine.

Their smiles were hidden behind burqas, the black veils covering most of their faces. But there was a glimmer in their eyes as I caught their gazes and returned their shy smiles. They laughed as they worked up the nerve to ask for a photo. The encounter was repeated several more times with other welcoming strangers as we walked through the park.

My friends and I wore brightly colored salwar suits that day and tried to fit in, but we couldn’t hide the white skin that made us the celebrities of the day. We laughed later as we looked through our photos and thought how many family pictures we ended up in, strangers in a sea of lovely brown skin. The boldness of the South Asians who asked for “a photo ma’am” or snuck a selfie with us in the background made us snicker.

But a whispered second thought halted our lighthearted laughter. How do we make foreigners in our midst feel?

When we see people who obviously don’t look like they belong, do we treat them with such adoration? Do we stop to see them at all?…