It's a "Holiday"

No, I don't have work off.

It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day. There's an image floating around, with a number of flesh-tone crayons, of all the usual colors, pink, cream, tan, brown, etc. with the caption "Not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"

At first I thought it was a cute, if somewhat cliched picture. All the colors of human skin, represented by crayons, all with the title "flesh" as if to say we're all human. Which, I guess we are.

But as the picture kept popping up on my news feed, over and over, I realized that it bothered me. It wasn't the image that bothered me, it was the fact that the subtext at least in my mind was that we're all the same, and that if everybody would just get along everything would be just fine. That bothers me, because, if we look at the quote in it's entirety Martin Luther King Jr. stressed that people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Emphasis mine.

Yet this image, that keeps being shared on Facebook gets it wrong. Nothing in the image mentions, or evokes a feeling of character. It simply mentions the color or skin, or crayon, in this metaphor. The issue is that we haven't yet gotten over the issue of color.

I've been called racist, and maybe I am. But I'm willing to look past color, creed, religion, orientation, and culture. I'm willing to see past the clothes, and the skin, and the materialistic trappings, if the character is there.

I don't care if you're black, white, or blue. I care that you're a decent human being and no spread of crayons with a cute caption is going to change the fact that if you're weak morally, if you lack the force of character, then nobody has anything to judge you on then the color of your skin.

Let's see if by next year at this time we can find an image macro for that.