Why is color often the first thing we see and say about something?
When it comes down to identifying something within a group, identifying it by its color color is just about the easiest way to pick an object out in a crowd of similar objects. Whether it's a car among cars, a flower among flowers or any other thing surrounded by things just like it, colors are what we see on the surface, so they're what makes it easy to identify things.
We do this every day:
"Hey! Look at that red car."
"Cut the green wire; not the yellow one, but the green one." (It's always the green one)
"Did you see that orange shirt that guy had on?"
And we don't think anything about it. We identify things by their colors all the time, but what about people? How do we identify them?
The other day, a group of guys were passing my friend and I at a restaurant, and my friend turned to me and mentioned that, "the guy in the blue shirt looked really familiar to him." After he said this, I turned around to look at the guys that had just walked past me at who it might be, trying to find a blue shirt in the throng of people. It took me a cool minute to pick him out, but when I did, I noticed that the guy my friend had mentioned was African-American, and also the only African-American in the building.
I didn't think much about it at the time, but after looking back on it later, it seems like it would've been a lot easier, and much more my own personal instinct, to have identified the guy as, "the black guy." After all, he was the only African-American in the building; that would've made it much quicker and easier on my eyes to sort through than trying to pick out a shirt color. If I had been my friend in that situation, I would've turned to me and said, "that black guy looks really familiar," rather than saying, "the guy in the blue shirt looks familiar." It's a simple instance with little to no real implication to a broad scope of people, yet it did reveal something about myself that I didn't really like; I'm quick to see race and slow to see equality.
Afterward, I talked to my friend about the situation, and he told me about how he's been trying to be more hyperaware of how he identifies others, not as their color, like he would a 'thing.' I thought this was a great point. It gets down to who a person is and not just what's on the surface. A guy or girl may be white or black, but we all wear clothes. A guy or girl may look a certain way or be a certain way, but we have commonalities as humans and as people. There's more to than what just meets the eye, and if we can start identifying others in a way that is being hyperaware of knowing a person is more than just the color of their skin or how they're different than we are, then I think that would be a great start. We may find out we're more similar than we are different.
-Cliff
Cliff's Note: The irony of color is that there is more behind color than what meets the eye.