Purple people (1974?- ) are creatures from the moral universe of white racists – along with Arab traders, black best friends, Rented Negroes and Will Smith. Purple people come up whenever a white person (and on occasion even a black person) wants to show how colour-blind he is, how race does not affect his judgement. You hear about them in statements like this: “I don’t care if you’re black, white, purple or green, it’s the person that counts.” Sometimes polka dots and stripes are thrown in too.
On the face of it, it does sound colour-blind. But then why is it that it comes across as a put-down to people of colour? And why does it seem to be said mostly by the very people who are anything but colour-blind? Why is it you cannot imagine Tim Wise or Martin Luther King saying something like this?
Take the last question first because it answers the others: an anti-racist like Tim Wise would never bring up purple people (except to talk about them like I am) because he takes colour and race too seriously. It is not something to be made light of by putting it in the same sentence with polka dots and stripes, not something to be compared to science fiction creatures from another world like purple people.
Why it seems that white people do it:
- Their colour is not a serious issue because it does not directly affect them in a bad way.
- They do not want to talk about colour. They want to wave the whole thing away instead of face it and deal with it seriously – another piece of racist deflection.
Compare:
- I don’t care if you’re black, white, purple or green, it’s the person that counts.
- I don’t care if you’re black or white, it’s the person that counts.
The second statement is more serious and also harder to defend. Even worse, it can lead into uncomfortable talk about race.
Throwing in purple, green, polka dots and stripes makes colour seem less serious than it is. It does that by making it just about physical description and not culture, history, pain, identity, injustice, divided cities, bad schools, unemployment and all the rest.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine just how innocent these statements about purple people are.
Just so you know, I did an Internet search: those who bring up purple people the most these days are Republicans who are against Obama – trying to prove that race has nothing to do with it.
And just so you know, white people are racist against purple people, so even on that level the thing is a lie. How do we know? Because of Second Life, an online world where you can make yourself look anyway you want. One women on Second Life made herself white and people were friendly, but when she made herself purple the very same people would not talk to her, even if she said, “Hi!” first. Even cyborgs got more love.
See also:
- Blog posts on this subject: Stuff White People Do, Racialicious, Parableman, The Neon Season, Angry Black Woman.
- On being purple in Second Life
- Fellow moral creatures:
- Arab traders
- black best friends
- Rented Negroes
- race conscious
- Being colour-blind is not the solution
- colour-blind racism
- Lorene Cary: Black Ice – she heard about purple people back in the 1970s
Hello Abagond,
Do you have a link to that story about Second Life?
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Purple People=Non-White. One has to ask oneself;why doesn’t a white person say this to other white people when in an argument? Most if not all of the time they say this when being in a conversation about race with a racilized person or when referencing situations related to race.
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I’m not going to tell you my race,I would like to add that race is a subject that makes Blacks equally uncomfortable when brought up in conversation,maybe even more so.
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and?
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I found purple people!
Ok, let me think about it for a moment…
Yes, I believe it’s about physical appearance. “I don’t care if you’re blond or a brunette or even a green haired or polka dot haired- it’s the person that counts”.
And perhaps it’s because some people (I guess mostly white people) are uncomfortable with the words “black” and “white” per se, so they tend to throw in “alien” colours such as green or purple.
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As a whitish looking aboriginal guy, I’ve run into this stupid point many times. Sometimes I point out that the argument is ignorant and dangerous because purple people may be aliens who want to do unspeakable experiments on you, and green people are often zombies who want to eat your brain.
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I do believe white people think they don’t care if a person is white or black- it’s the person that counts.
In reality, however, seeing someone’s personality is “somehow” more difficult if a person is black.
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Sometimes I point out that the argument is ignorant and dangerous because purple people may be aliens who want to do unspeakable experiments on you, and green people are often zombies who want to eat your brain.
I’m very upset that an enlightened blog such as this could let this horribly speciest remark about our venusian and martian friends stand unchallenged.
“Green people are zombies” indeed! You, sir, are a bigot of the first order! 😀
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BtW, is that a picture of the Blue Man Group under red lights up there, or what?
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[…] purple people […]
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What’s wrong with this post?
It’s claiming that people with genuinely blue, green, orange, and yellow don’t exist.
Which is beyond stupid; it’s ignorant to the diseases that exist out there, how strange skin tones actually can, in fact, exist, and it is discriminatory to every single person who has ever had carotenosis, argyria, jaundice, gangrene, ETC, to call them “aliens”, just because they have a fucking skin condition.
You think you have it bad?
Most of these people are going to DIE, prematurely, because of their skin condition, some of them sooner than others; and then they have to put up with twits like you assuming that they’re “aliens” from another planet!
There’s less of them, and they are seen as less ‘normal’ by everyone. They walk outside, there is nobody who looks like them for probably 1000 miles.
People will treat them like a fucking joke.
They will have even more difficulty than you in getting a job, having a relationship, and so on.
This is a guy with Argyria, a condition that occurs when people ingest colloidal silver, it can turn their skin a sort of bluish-grey, sometimes leaning more towards grey, sometimes leaning more to blue.
You don’t have to be a Doctor to know this stuff; it took me about 10 seconds to discover this genetic condition.
Here are some more references to the condition of blue skin, so you don’t think I’m relying on just one source.
http://www.dermnetnz.org/reactions/argyria.html
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1069121-overview
Now, onto green skin! You think you have it tough? Try being treated like a fucking alien from outer space because your gangrene is slowly turning your flesh a different color, in addition to killing you. I’m willing to give this one a pass, since if your entire body was covered in enough gangrene to make ALL your skin look green, you’d probably be dead.
But you can also get green skin from exposure to certain metals, especially copper.
http://www.dailyglow.com/blogs/skin-and-hair-care/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-green-skin-disorder-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11990922
Orange skin? Yellow skin? Possibly you could have carotenosis, or Jaundice. Carotenosis is usually due to the yellow pigment carotene being present in the blood stream, usually from excessive intake of carrots and other vegetables.
But Jaundice is worse. It’s a sign of liver damage. And I’m pretty sure the liver is important.
http://www.medicinenet.com/jaundice/article.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaundice
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003243.htm
So before you go and talk about how “blue people” is somehow “alien”, maybe you should do some research.
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@tokengingercharacter
I don’t know if you’re being a silly troll or you just genuinely missed the point of this post completely lol
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@Gen
Possibly both? If you’d like, we can have that other off-topic post deleted, and I’ll just say what I think of all this:
I think that every single person in the world is different.
All of them.
Every single human who ever was, ever is, ever could be, is different.
We all have our own interests, our own hobbies, our own likes and dislikes, our own ways of doing things, our own tastes, our own thoughts.
No two people are alike. You can be a blind Indian who’s into UFOs, you can be a Jamaican transsexual who’s also a dentist. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it!
So why do so many “anti-racists” insist on using labels? Why should I judge a book by its cover? Why should a skin color be what ‘defines’ someone?
It sounds suggestive of hive-minds to say that black people are inherently different from white people for no other reason than because of a skin pigment; suggesting all black people think one way, all white people the other.
Prejudice is when someone makes a judgment about someone else when they don’t know all the facts, so how can you say I have to treat somebody according to their race before I even know anything about them?
Or maybe I’ve just got the wrong idea about this.
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Yeah. And massive bruising could cause a person to have a purple skin discoloration…uh huh, and when those bruises start to fade, you’ll have your purple person with yellow polka dots…n’ shit.
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Interestingly enough, the “purple people” defense goes back at least a few decades further than you mention in this post. In the movie Blackboard Jungle (1955), Warnke, the white principal of a multi-ethnic high school, says “I don’t care if a boy’s skin is black, yellow, or purple, he gets the same breaks, the same teaching, as any white boy.”
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Amazing how often legitimate dialogue gets derailed with foolishness by people who, because they themselves claim to be above the discussion, (meaning they don’t have to deal with the subject to any significant level) deem the topic to be meaningless. Just like the polka dot and green people (or the whole attempt at ridiculing any mention of people of color), it comes from a subconscious (or not) desire that “those” people would stop reminding them of discrimination that is going on, and be polite and pretend that it wasn’t happening so that the mainstream can enjoy all the stereotyping and exclusion that goes on in society.
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Just found this post. Love it!
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It’s very convenient to say especially if the person is uncomfortable with race. But it really is an insulting thing to say because it means they don’t really see you.
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