Those who know the music of the late, great Curtis Mayfield know that one of the songs on his seminal, eponymous debut album was “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue” (released forty-five years ago this month). Given how black people sometimes treat each other based on skin tone, and given Mayfield’s own complexion, I always thought that song carried an extra dose of pathos. He, however, made it clear he meant to include more than those as dark as he. “I’m talking ’bout brown and yellow, too,” he sang. Those words are being borne out in places and in ways he never had in mind.

     On the continent where 18^th century German scholars created the concept of whiteness with their invention of racial “science”, people are once again being dismissed for falling short of an arbitrary standard. In Hungary – a country once occupied by the German Nazis, followed by the Soviet communists and now under the leadership of right-wing nationalists – people are being singled out based on skin color. Inundated by tens of thousands of desperate men, women and children fleeing fighting in Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Libya, the Hungarians have blocked the refugees’ progress toward Northern and Western Europe with razor-wire fences, police lines and discerning eyes. The latter involves police at the Budapest train station “allowing white and lighter-skinned people to pass through but stopping and demanding papers from virtually all darker-skinned people.” (The Washington Post). The question this raises is what matters most, status or color? The Syrian refugee I saw interviewed in a CBS news segment, describing his lack of food and sleep, was fair-skinned and blue-eyed. What reason would Hungarian police have to stop him based on the criteria already set?

     This tactic echoes one being employed closer to home. In the Dominican Republic, where black people have managed to convince themselves they aren’t black, the government has passed anti-immigrant laws aimed not only at Haitians, but even Dominicans of Haitian descent. Demanding that such people provide papers proving their right to remain in the country, the government decided that one way to deal with those who could not obtain the necessary documentation was to expel the ones who were deemed dark-skinned or African in appearance.

     It is ironic that a proximity to whiteness has attained such importance. In her book The History of White People, renowned Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter writes that the ancient Greeks noted their northern neighbors (whom they considered to be barbarians) had lighter skin than the Greeks thought normal. That was then. The new norm means people reaching Greece today from the Middle East and North Africa face additional hardships based solely on not being white enough.

     Perhaps some of those refugees from places like Iraq, when reflecting upon the life they left behind, might gain an appreciation for the difficulties of some of their former compatriots still at home. I have in mind the more than half-a-million, marginalized black Iraqis who trace their ancestry to slaves who arrived beginning in the 6^th century and continuing until the 20^th. One such Iraqi was a man named Jalal Dhiyab Thijeel, described in a New York Times article as tall, funny and handsome. Taking inspiration from the opening of Iraqi society after the 2003 American invasion and, later, by the election of Barack Obama, Jalal began to push for anti-discrimination laws in Iraq. His efforts resulted in his assassination in 2013.

     Today, people who are much lighter than blue nevertheless sit in makeshift camps in Hungary. A line from a song unknown to them would offer some insight, if they could only hear it. “If your mind could really see, you’d know you’re colored the same as me.”