My mother possessed a most interesting appearance. Her hair was a raven colored black that she never needed to dye even as she lived into her eighties. Her eyeswere a deep brown like a just brewed cup of coffee. He skin was an olive hue that grew darker whenever she spent time in the sun. She was an exotic beauty who often confused people when they attempted to determine her race or nationality. 

A Jewish friend insisted that Mama was descended from one of the tribes of Israel. A Black neighbor wondered aloud why so many white people came to visit my mom. Italians compared her to Sophia Loren. People from the Middle East commented that she must surely have had ancestors from their neck of the woods. She was a chameleon who some people thought resembled Queen Elizabeth. She joked that she should have been a character actress because she could have been made to look like hundreds of different people. 

Perhaps the strangest thing about my mother’s appearance is that it contrasted so amazingly with her sisters. They all boasted blonde hair and blue eyes. One might have thought she was adopted save for the fact that she looked very much like her brothers. Whatever the case she always reminded me that you can’t really tell where someone originated simply by looking at them. Each person is indeed unique and a combination of many different iterations of DNA. To classify a person simply on outward features is to miss the importance of celebrating the beautiful variety of people on this earth. 

I suspect that if my mother had grown up in Europe and under the control of the Nazis during Hitler’s regime she might have caught the eye of someone wondering if she belonged in one of the camps set aside for Jews and Gypsies and individuals who were deemed unfit to pollute the gene pool. If they had been privy to today’s genetic information they would have realized that she indeed had a tiny bit of Eastern European Jew in her background. Would that have made her a candidate for being sent away from the rest of society? Would her bipolar disorder have been noted resulting in her death at the hands of grotesque individuals?

I have been thinking more and more of such things now that people seem to be randomly scooped from the streets of our cities simply because they appear to share the physical qualities of Hispanics. She certainly had many of those characteristic features so it would not be far fetched to think that someone might turn her in as a prospective illegal. Of course she would have been able to ultimately prove that she was born here in the United States but her mother was an immigrant who never became a citizen. Would the current administration question whether birth gave my mother the right to enjoy all of the perks of being a citizen? 

We talk about laws and rules but rarely get down to the worth of each individual. I know that a truly religious person should value every person who walks on this earth but sadly many who profess to be devout Christians find little or no fault in targeting anyone who has dark features or an accent or the inability to speak English as someone who must be sent away. They are eager to push such people from our country no matter how that is done. They do not seem to view the people being targeted as individuals much like themselves who only want the opportunity to work and be free. Those are after all qualities after which most of us aspire. 

I saddens me that my Puerto Rican father-in-law now carries his passport with him at all times as proof that he has been an American citizen from the time he was born. He constantly points out that he is whiter than some people with Nordic features. It is as though people have somehow taught him that looking white provides advantages that even dark people like my mother may not have received. I wonder why in the twenty-first century we are still placing a value on the shade of a person’s skin or the language that they speak. Surely we are advanced enough to understand that such differences from person to person are trivial and actually make the world so much more interesting than if than if we all looked and behaved exactly the same. 

I long for a time which I will probably never see in which we see the beauty of every single person. I think of how much happier everyone would be if we just stopped comparing and making judgements about each other. Taking the time to get to know someone is so much better than ranking folks on trivial characteristics. My mother was beautiful just as she was and she never had to be this or that for everyone to see that it was so. We are all beautiful and that should not be so hard to see.