One could not see the Greek, the Celt, the Roman, the man of the Renaissance, not even the Victorian on a white face, for Western civilisation had moved too fast to leave any telltale signs of the past on the European skin. She thought: the white face is without history: too familiar, too unremarkable – always modern. But a look at an Indian face sends the mind travelling back a thousand years. The Olmec, the Maya, the Toltec, the Mexica were still there in the coppery skin, the prominent nose, the high cheekbones, the epicanthic fold, the brown eyes staring back from the deep well of time.
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.