Your blue eyes = fail

It's always nice to have a bit of racism/racial elitism tossed your way.

There was a group of people, mostly Japanese but with one Chinese person present and then me. This was a conversation class I was teaching, so I couldn't get too mad or I might lose the job (this happened actually several years ago - I was just reminded of it by someone bringing up almost the same thing yesterday).

Anyway, the topic of discussion was colors; specifically we were talking about symbolism various cultures attach to different colors, and talking about how this possibly came to be, and modern applications of old color symbolism. It was a very high-brow intellectual discussion.

Until one guy decides to ruin the mood.

This old guy tosses out this little bit of wisdom: that white people love the color red because our blue eyes don't let us see red as deeply as Asians do with their "black" eyes.

Now, one of the other class members was quick to point out that while many Japanese people say they have black eyes the actual color of their irises is brown. And so he jokingly suggested that maybe Asians then can't see yellow or some other color as well as people with blue or green eyes. The old guy's response: yes, Chinese people with brown eyes probably don't see yellow well; hence the Chinese affinity for... red (?!?).

At this point, the scientist in me had to intervene. I was also hoping to save the class before more feelings got hurt. I pointed out the fact that you don't see through your irises at all - it's the pupil (the black hole at the center) that lets in light. From your point of view your eye color makes no difference, since you can't see it anyway.

I don't think this brief explanation satisfied him at all. But he shut up. Maybe he realized that the whole point of his line of dialogue was: hey you whitey (and Chinese lady while I'm at it), your blue eyes suck!! I doubt it tho.

Well, that's about all of what happened. I'm posting this now because I heard the same basic argument stated as fact. And I wondered, even if this was true (and it isn't), what point is there in bringing it up? But then I guess it's the same as almost any of the thousands of racial or social categorical dismissals that are brought up by people all the time. They all amount to the same thing:

Hey, did you hear about [ race X ]? Yes, because they have [ insert sucky trait, or positive ability that really hurts them in some way ] they aren't as good as we are. [ signal universal approval of how great  speaker's race is ]