Oh, To Be Colorblind In Boston

Appearance is what America is all about. Forget brains, skill or academic achievement. You’ve got to look sharp, feel sharp and be sharp if you want to get anywhere around here.

Admit it: An ugly guy is never going to be president and fat girls don’t get invited to the dance. When was the last time you saw someone bigger than a bungalow reading the news on television? Or someone whose forehead has cleavage getting elected to anything?

Ever see a kid with enormous zits employed to advertise jeans? How about somebody with more facial hair than a werewolf pitching the 1997 Nissan Maxima?

I don’t think so.

This country is about being pretty. Being easy on the eyes. Having great hair, straight white teeth, a pleasant, non-threatening look.

You could have the IQ of a footlocker, but if you resemble Brooke Shields or Tom Cruise, your chances of getting in the door are a whole lot better than if you are an exact double for Murray Abraham’s dog, not to mention its face. That’s just the way it is.

And it extends to everything around us.

If there’s a suspicious fire in a house about to be purchased by a black family and it happens to be located in a neighborhood that is 98 percent white, it should not shock us when a few people quickly, and mistakenly, assume that the fire was set by someone whiter than a sheet and that Boston’s Wellesley neighborhood is home to racism. Isn’t Wellesley 98 percent white?

Appearance, man! It’s who we are. It’s how we think.

White woman walking to her car on a dark, deserted downtown street sees a black guy cross the block and head right toward her. Quick, what goes through her mind? (A) Gee, this is a marvelous opportunity to meet someone diverse by giving him a hearty hello? Or (B) Sweet Jesus, forgive me my sins because I am about to be raped and robbed?

I mean, the guy could be Nelson Mandela, Mo Vaughn, anyone at all, but to a lot of folks, his mere appearance would pose a threat. How come? Why, especially around greater Boston, are we obsessed with, and why do we wring our hands about, skin color?

Go to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, and life is different. Those cities long ago were integrated economically, socially and residentially. Grow up there, live there, work there, have a child in school there and you actually get to know black human beings.

It is amazing how you quickly can discover that black people are like white people. They use utensils when they eat supper. They yell at their children and make them do homework and clean their rooms. They value a dollar and hate high taxes, drugs and soaring crime.

But Boston might be the most geographically segregated little big town in America. Blacks have located in a few neighborhoods of only a few sections of town, so most whites go through life limited in their knowledge of black culture by what Bill Cosby says on television or by what Michael Jordan does on a basketball court. That’s it.

Unwittingly, thousands of whites - generation after generation - have been cheated out of getting hit in the face with the notion that life is richer and more interesting when there is a mix. Then, you see that black people can be bores, too, that they have dreams, cheat at golf, tell dirty jokes and, occasionally, behave like racists.

But the big whites who dominate the media, politics, banks and insurance companies in this rube of a region apparently are too thick or too isolated to understand this aspect of black existence.

And these whites become so petrified at ever being accused of giving offense to any minority that they ignore reality and focus exclusively on appearance. They do this because they think it’s right, when, in fact, it is totally offensive, incredibly paternalistic and obnoxiously unfair as well as thoroughly and condescendingly racist.

One stupid fire in one white community gets them running around, shouting as if Bull Connor and the Selma fire hoses of 30 years ago were just down the block, this time with gas and matches. By magnifying the ridiculous, they trivialize the larger dilemma: Appearance is a lousy substitute for knowledge.