Similarly, I did not know that a person at my office was black until I asked him, “Are you black?” I knew there was something different about him, but because I am so race-blind, I just couldn’t put my finger on it until I asked. Plus, he always wore really expensive suits to work, which I thought was something only white people did. I was thrilled to learn that he was black, because I have always wanted a black friend, so I asked him if he wanted to chillax at my cribizzle on Fridizzle, and then he reported me to HR and now I no longer work at his company.

Funny things like that are always happening to me because of my inability to see race. For instance, how I like to tell race jokes when I am with white people, but sometimes I forget that a color person is there and no one laughs. Or, how I like to tease my white friends by jokingly calling them racial slurs, but because I cannot distinguish between my white friends and my color friends, sometimes I accidentally call one of my color friends a word which sometimes is the right slur for their race but other times isn’t. But in any case it explains why I do not have many ethnicity friends.

Visual artists, poets, and musicians are releasing free content online faster than ever before. There is an athleticism to these aesthetic outpourings, with artists taking on the creative act as a way of exercising other muscle groups, bodybuilding a personal brand or self-mythology, a concept or a formal vocabulary. Images, music, and words become drips in a pool of art sweat, puddling online for all to view. The long-derided notion of the “masterpiece” has reached its logical antithesis with the aesthlete: a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid production.

The best way to dehumanize someone while claiming you’re not is to believe you are just the same. You erase their experiences and perspective, their struggles and obstacles, their unique way of having to deal with those things in a world that also erases them. With the words, ‘but humans are humans’ or the bullshit dramatics of ‘we all bleed red’ normal people can simply pretend that if we all did things the way they did, then everything would work out okay. But, yes, we all bleed red but you don’t treat a papercut the same way you treat a gash, you don’t treat an infected wound the same way you treat one that isn’t, you don’t treat a wound to the leg the same way you treat a wound to the gut. You are not acknowledging someone’s personhood when you ignore the very things that make their lives different than yours, and when you refuse to understand that their circumstances have given them their own perspective that is just as valid as yours. More valid in fact – their perspective about their experiences that you haven’t been through is far more valid than anything you could ever think about it.