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Walter Suza| Guest opinion columnist

My mother was the child of my Black grandfather and my grandmother, who had white ancestry. In preschool in rural Tanzania, I was surprised to hear other kids label my mother as mzungu, which is a Kiswahili word for white person. That word did not make sense because my mother was just mama to me.

In my early teen years, I began to realize the impact of the skin color label given to my mother. Other kids with darker skin labeled me soft because the color of my skin was lighter. This saddened me because all I wanted was a chance to play soccer with those kids.

I couldnt understand why I was labeled soft, because I was convinced I played soccer as hard as the other kids. In spite of the effort I put into soccer, I found myself waiting on the sidelines for one of the other kids to get tired so I would be allowed in the game.

When I was 19, I left Tanzania for Zimbabwe, where I faced more surprises about how skin color was used to categorize people. I arrived several years after Zimbabwes independence and witnessed segregation of Black and white neighborhoods, a remnant of racist policies in the former Southern Rhodesia.

I lived in a neighborhood for coloreds (people of mixed race) and attended a predominantly colored school. My Black schoolmates often asked me whether I was colored, which sounded odd to me, because I considered myself a kid just like them.

After my arrival in the United States in 2000, I encountered questions about skin color in college application forms. Questions such as, Are you Black or African American or Are you White made me wonder why they needed to know this on a college application.

I also heard on a regular basis words such as black sheep, black heart, black market, black book, black eye and so on. This made me wonder about the use of black in situations that had a more negative context.

This is how I learned that we live in a world that judges people based on their skin color. It was living in the United States that I was labeled the black guy and experienced the N-word for the first time.

Today, this reality makes me worry about my Black children experiencing discrimination because of the color of their skin.

In 1959, a white man named John Howard Griffin attempted to experience the reality of being Black in America. Black men told me that the only way a white man could hope to understand anything about this reality was to wake up some morning in a black mans skin, writes Griffin in the book Black Like Me.

Griffin took a drug that turned his skin black and found himself facing the grim reality of racism and loss of his privileges when his skin was white including having to deal with death threats.

Griffins experiment confirmed that racism starts with our perception of ones physical features such as skin color followed by unfavorable treatment of the victim.

Unfortunately, a large segment in our country denies that racism exists.

In the book White Like Me, Tim Wise writes: I would not be the white guy who would assume (Black people) were exaggerating, making things up, or fabricating the difficulties of their daily routine.

I agree. It would be wrong to question anyones experience with racism. And if we truly believe in the Declaration of Independence, we must also be willing to address our struggle with racism because it denies others their right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

In addressing the issue of skin color and its contribution to racism, we must also be willing to consider other points of view.

First, although race has been primarily about skin color, at the genetic level, all humans share 99.9 percent of our genetic blueprint DNA.

Second, science also explains that black and white as colors are about absorption or reflection of light. We see an object as white when it reflects almost all light and black when it absorbs most of the light.

Third, if we dont agree with the science, perhaps we might agree with the spiritual principle that All men are created equal.

In other words, all people are shades of black and white.

In his I have a dream speech, Martin Luther King Jr. said, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

I hope that America will realize that the skin we wear are gifts from our biological parents. We did not choose our parents. We all carry eternal innocence deep in our souls. That innocence connects us in our humanness.

You are just Black and white like me.

Walter Suza of Ames writes frequently on the intersections of spirituality, anti-racism and social justice. He can be contacted atwsuza2020@gmail.com.

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Walter Suza: We are all just Black and white like me - Ames Tribune