More on Colors - Visiting Brown Hair Island

I'm not done rambling about this yet.

Everyone is biased. That, as far as I am concerned, is a fact. When you choose friends, you may be biased toward funny people, or intelligent people, or people who like the same games or TV shows as you do. When hiring employees, you might be biased toward people who work quickly, or people who do high-quality work, or people who work well with others. When interacting with others, there's a fair bet that you will be biased toward people with a similar skin tone to yours.

Is this a problem?

Let's imagine that there is an island where everyone has brown hair. We'll call it Brown Hair Island. Everyone on Brown Hair Island prefer brown hair. They prefer people with brown hair. They are nicer to people with brown hair than they are to people who don't have brown hair. But this isn't really a problem because everyone on Brown Hair Island has brown hair.

One day, a person with red hair visited Brown Hair Island and was upset that the people on Brown Hair Island weren't as nice to them as they were to each other, and the red-haired person had every right to be upset. The people of Brown Hair Island were being rude to the red-haired person for no good reason. But when the red-haired person talked about this to a brown-haired person, the brown-haired person said that they had once visited Red Hair Island, and they experienced similar discrimination.

The majority of people in America are light-skinned, and those people generally feel more comfortable around other people with light skin. This is, in a sense, a light-skinned island. But there are neighborhoods in America where there are a lot of dark-skinned people, and when I pass through those areas, I sometimes feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, and at times, even unsafe.

The fact that there are light- and dark-skinned islands in the world isn't necessarily a problem, and the fact that people visit, and even live on, islands that don't match their skin tone isn't a problem, either. But there is a problem, and unfortunately, it's not one that can be easily solved.

The simple solution is for everyone to treat everyone else the same, regardless of their skin tone, but that's about as easy as being as good friends with funny people as you are with intellectual people, even if you prefer the intellectual people. I'm not sure it can be done. People can't just "turn off" their own biases and preferences. We can try to reduce them, but I'm pretty sure they'll always be there. And if the majority of the people who live on a certain island can't completely get rid of their preference for brown hair, a red-haired person on that island will never be able to shake the feeling that the people of that island would like them better if they had different-colored hair. That is brown-haired privilege, the privilege of having brown hair on a brown-haired island.

I agree that the world shouldn't be that way, but I'm not sure what can be done about it. Our preferences are part of what makes us individuals, and even though people shouldn't prefer one kind of person over another, I'm fairly certain that people always will. Of course, we can try to reduce the problem. We can try to prove to brown-haired people that red-haired people are just as likeable as people with brown hair. But you know, some people are still going to prefer brown hair over red hair, and as a red-haired person, I'm just going to have to live with that.