In just one city, there can be people with Italian, French, Corsican and Spanish surnames. In another, there may be German, Irish, Scottish or English. Somewhere else, they can be singing bomba. On the other street, plena. A woman in a beach would keep frying alcapurrias and piononos, while her husband chops off a recently-thrown coconut for the piña colada. We don't care about race, we never learned to take care of race. It is such a flawed concept that, at least for me, it shouldn't even be a factor that outweighs every attempt at happiness.
My mother is cinnamon-skinned, and my father is a kind of dirty French vanilla. My sister is a café espresso, while I am something called a jabao'. No, don get it wrong; for us, these aren't derogatory ways that people think we use about race—not that I would know. In fact, they are mostly terms of endearment—at least for me. I may have a light skin, but it's still slightly burned. I may speak fluent English like the next guy, but my Spanish is still peppered with that delightful mixture of Andalusian and Canarian delights people dismiss as vulgar and confusing. Nevertheless, I never admit I'm white: there's still something about the nappy hair and the big nose that throws the illusion away. People may say I'm black or that I speak like a Dominican, but I don't care: God made me like this, and to Him I am indebted. Where I come from, the concept of race wasn't that all important. Everybody knew that someone in their family would be whiter, and someone else would be blacker. Our neighbors from left and right waved at us, talked with us, cooked the same food, and had different racial tones. Not that there wasn't any hint of racism in Puerto Rico; of course, we are a multicultural society, but that doesn't mean we never faced our own apartheid. But, unlike many other nations, we have learned to truly cherish our diverse racial makeup. In just one city, there can be people with Italian, French, Corsican and Spanish surnames. In another, there may be German, Irish, Scottish or English. Somewhere else, they can be singing bomba. On the other street, plena. A woman in a beach would keep frying alcapurrias and piononos, while her husband chops off a recently-thrown coconut for the piña colada. We don't care about race, we never learned to take care of race. It is such a flawed concept that, at least for me, it shouldn't even be a factor that outweighs every attempt at happiness. “¿Y tu abuela, donde eh'tá?”, that's the cry of the people. We've already suffered our own share of billings and stereotyping and trolling and bigotry. Unfortunately, such is life, and we can only do so much to prevent it from happening. Next time, we should be color-blind; that way, we'll never worry about the color of someone else's skin. But God didn't want for us to be color-blind. If He did, would we look at the green leafs or the blue heavens or the delectable palates that play with the tongue. I don't define life as being for blacks only, whites only, or even yellows and Hispanics only; God doesn't -and He created colors- so who are we to call them out for the color they wear on their skin?
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