Pigments

Human beings: the political animal, narcissistic, nepotistic, obsessed with hierarchies, uses economics, ideology, and even violence to enforce these hierarchies; human color gradients gradually appear. Tiny differences are magnified while vast similarities are ignored to the point of absolute delusion. The rigid race lines humans draw are dotted at best. We're all human, this is clear. So why draw the race line? Who benefits from drawing this line? And when it's time to draw, where do we start? There is no shortage of Americans who suffer from a race complex, the origins of which can be traced back to the trauma of slavery; it is plain to see that certain groups in America actively try to forget this trauma; they would like to believe that all is fine now, and that centuries of buying and selling human beings like cattle has had no effect on the country that practiced it, or the people subjected to it; they believe that they can rid themselves of this trauma by simply not thinking about it. But it is this very act of forgetting, of not thinking about it, that gives the race complex its power. Reese Simmons attempts to relieve America of its obsession with race through a unique approach of fiction and essay, entering into a candid discussion of race, bringing the subject into the reader's consciousness, giving the reader control over the subject, and thereby reducing its manifest sensitivity.