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This letter, "Why Must Human Beings Be Colors?" comes from Veronica McLaurin-Brown, a retired educator and co-founder of the Love Our Children group, which advocated for ending suspensions for the youngest students in the New Hanover County Schools district. McLaurin-Brown lives in Wilmington.
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Here is a question Americans rarely ask: Why do we continue defining human beings as Black and white?
Not culturally, historically or politically. I mean literally: Why do colors remain among our primary classifications for people?
For centuries, “Black” and “white” were not neutral descriptions. They became political and social categories used to assign freedom and enslavement, belonging and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage. Our government reinforced this framework through official classifications that changed across generations, including “Black,” “Mulatto,” “Negro,” “White” and others. The names shifted, but the practice of sorting human beings by race endured.
We rejected the belief that color should determine human worth. Yet we kept the colors and much of the meaning attached to them.
I saw how early that meaning can reach children while sitting at a table with two 7-year-old girls. One mentioned playing with a friend and calling the child by name. The other immediately replied that her father did not like Black people, although she and her mother did.
What stayed with me was not only what she said, but how naturally she said it. At seven, she had already learned that people could be divided by color and that one color could determine whether someone was liked or disliked. She had not created that framework. She had inherited it through ordinary conversation and daily life.
That is how racial thinking survives. It is carried not only through laws, open hatred or deliberate instruction, but also through jokes, warnings, assumptions, family conversations, school interactions, neighborhood boundaries and expectations about intelligence, beauty, danger and belonging. These seemingly small messages accumulate. They shape personal relationships and help preserve wider social, political and economic hierarchies.
This is not an argument for erasing Black history or asking anyone to surrender a proudly chosen identity. African Americans transformed “Black” into an identity of culture, resistance, resilience, solidarity and achievement. That history deserves respect. Self-identification should remain a personal choice.
But respect for Black identity should not prevent us from questioning the larger color system. And if we question “Black,” we must question “white” as well. Otherwise, we merely challenge one category while leaving the hierarchy’s presumed standard untouched.
We must continue teaching slavery, segregation, civil rights and present-day discrimination. We must still measure inequities and enforce civil-rights protections. But recognizing how society racializes people is not the same as accepting racial categories as permanent definitions of humanity.
The change I am proposing is cultural decoupling: separating the words “Black” and “white” from the inherited assumptions about intelligence, character, beauty, worth and belonging that history attached to them. It means teaching ancestry, heritage and culture with greater depth while weakening color’s authority to define the person.
Language alone will not dismantle racism. But language shapes perception, and perception influences institutions, relationships and opportunity.
America has spent generations seeking equality between Black and white. Perhaps equality between colors should not be the limit of our imagination.
Our children will inherit the history we cannot change. But they do not have to inherit every assumption, hierarchy and division that history created.
We can leave them a society where history teaches us, culture connects us, and humanity speaks louder than color.