Dear Editor,

Since the dawn of slavery there has been a focus on the black man’s colour as the basis for the oppression and prejudice directed against him, and hardly, if anything, to do with the economic disparity between the slave and his master.

Therefore, colour has become a convenient scapegoat to distort the true economic reason. Taken by itself, what value does the shade of a man’s skin play in a world of goods and services when the end is often used to justify the means? When a white slave master keeps a Negro toiling under brutal working conditions to keep the wheels of industry turning while surviving off the crumbs and scraps falling from big master’s table, it is more about economic leverage than the fact that a man is black.

Yet colour has become incidental, the way one may find it difficult to separate the conduct of a man from his fears. Obviously, the black population was at a disadvantage under forced servitude, but such disadvantage resulted because one man was positioned to be enriched by the elected hewers of wood and drawers of water and not because such roles were set in stone. In fact, if the wealth-creation roles were reversed, the white man could have been equally at the mercy of the Negro, contending with same injustice at the beck and call of the black man while suffering similar indignities.

Obviously, there is no inherent colour value out there, but riches make it so. Racism has become an empty luxury to detract and sustain prejudice. For what purpose would the shade of man’s skin serve if the producers of his wealth were to rebel and strip him of the necessities of his life or create his own economic blackout? Therefore, a man is more than wealth or race.

Homer Sylvester

h2sylvester@gmail.com