Inspired by the collection of short story works of the Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury in 1951, Giovanna Napoleone writes a story based on the prevalent issue of racial profiling in a creative, non-conventional way.
Spectrum
By Giovanna Napoleone
“Woah.”
Mark exhales, speechless, at the sight before him. His colorful complexion of flaming yellow hair and light blue skin stares straight back at him through the store mirror in full definition - a marvel he has never seen before. Backing away from the reflection, he asks the Lense salesman if he could try on another pair of glasses.
“Sure, I’ll be back in a minute.”
A minute?! A minute too long! Too excited to wait, the eager boy searches the shelves of many Lenses on his own, choosing at random. Taking hold of a lense with green shades, Mark quickly swaps his current blue pair for the other.
Once again, he stares in wonder at his mirrored image with a giant smile, now seeing a boy with duller blonde hair yet with brighter, almost green, skin. He can't believe that he is old enough to get his own pair of Lenses!
Mark turns towards his parents and grins widely. “How about this one?”
His mother, sporting her own three dimensional glasses, makes a thoughtful face. “I like the other one better.”
Nodding in agreement Mark puts down his current choice in replace of the original one he had tried on. Each Lense is unique to its owner, depending on one’s choice of glasses. This pair happens to have a bluish tint that Mark finds extremely fascinating.
Over twelve years he has never seen such different colors. The only one that actually existed were the dull, standard gray he had grown up with, but now it is different. No more pencil shades of white and blacks and boring grays - now there are reds and blues and greens!
Making a final decision, Mark follows his parents to the cash register as they pay for his essential new addition. Everyone gets Lenses when they get old enough, and Mark was more than ecstatic when he discovered that his parents wanted to take him to get a pair now.
“Alright!” Claps the father happily as the blue family pile into their car. “Here we go!” The electric orange vehicle speeds off onto the busy street with a flash of sparks and color, Mark entertaining himself with all of the new colors whizzing by.
Immediately the day after Mark had gotten his Lenses, he set out on an independent journey to rediscover his surroundings.
What interests Mark the most is the fact that everybody who has a different Lense sees the world differently; While Mark envisions blue, another can see any multiple shade of green, indigo, or navy.
The familiar bicycle shop he loves going to is no longer white but a vibrant aqua color, and the once monotonous gray public park is filled with beautiful mauve flowers. His strange neighbor is red, and his cat is pink!
But after a while there is something that he sees constantly that makes him almost annoyed. For the most part, all adults parade around the town with glum, unpleasant looks on their faces despite the color. Mark does not understand how anyone could not be as happy as he is to experience the world in such… vibrancy.
Tired, he decides to sit down on a bench for a while and simply digest all of the head-spinning things he has seen today.
However, not only a moment later does a sudden flicker of light infiltrate his new Lenses, and in the next second, everything becomes dark.
The electrical power goes out, and all color drains from the visible spectrum.
Surprised shrieks can be heard all around, people turning their heads blindly and frantically. The Lenses have stopped working. This has never happened before, at least not by accident. There has never been a flaw in his world’s technological department, which means that this must have been done on purpose by someone.
In realizing this, Mark takes off his glasses slowly as the chaos around him ensues. “What’s happened?”, he finds himself saying to no one in particular. But Mark’s low, childish voice is lost amongst the madness of the others.
Accusations, left and right, sound as shouts disrupt around the city.
“Who did this!?!”
“It was you, wasn’t it? Turn them back on!!”
“Ahhhh!”
Everywhere and all around people are arguing with others.
All cars stop driving in the streets, a gray one on the side of the road being abandoned because the owners have come out of the sidewalk to yell at each other with unforgiving gestures.
It is as if the people become literally blind. They are scared of not seeing the world in different colors - so scared that not one adult ever thought to move and take their glasses off so that they could observe clearly what was going on.
Mark holds his Lenses in his hands as he notices that everywhere people are so terrified of their vision being gone that they are running around helplessly blaming others - because what else can they do?
It does not matter what color anything is anymore - what matters is the mistrust of others and not knowing who is seeing what. It is like the people do not know how to interact with one another, as if each individual one sees is somewhat alien to them.
Just having discovered the Lenses Mark should not be very attached to the things anyways, however, he finds the anger inside of him only grow.
The power is still not turning back on, and he is upset at the loss of perspective. And since no one is answering his questions and confusions he resorts to another option.
“Hey you!” He calls to a quiet looking man. He is a stranger, a person he once saw to look red under the Lenses but is now an underestimated charcoal gray color. “Tell me what is going on.”
The man simply stands there with his hands buried in his pockets and blinks hard.
“I-I don’t know.”
Mark lets out a frustrated scream. “Why not?”
“I -“
Mark cuts the man off by shoving him aggressively, not in control of his actions, and then proceeds to stomp away in order to demand answers from somebody else who looks like a decent target.
Because how else can he distinguish people without the Lenses showing him his favorite colors?
Author's Reflection
In the short story Spectrum, the present claim within the story is intended to suggest the idea that racial profiling is still relevant today, and can not possibly end unless people change their mindset. In addition, racism is also argued to be about a sense of suspicion, and within that, a sense of trust and distrust between people that do not look similar to each other. The glasses, or Lenses, within the story represent the filters that people see through when they see racial differences which also show their different perspectives of the world due to it. By having different colors being seen by all people in the story, it shows that every person has their own different versions of racism, or that racism is unique to individuals. The character Mark is chosen for the purpose of him being a kid growing up because in the story he wasn't metaphorically exposed to racism before his purchase of Lenses, but now that he does have them, he can now see the prevalent differences in the world that distinguishes people from one another that he did not see as a child. Within the text, the color blue is used by Mark to describe himself while the stranger he confronts and manages to shove at the end, who is actually Mark’s unnamed neighbor, is described as appearing red. The color blue is often meant to represent trust and loyalty, which disappears once the Lenses stop working for Mark. However, the stranger who Mark viewed as red could be perceived as dangerous and untrustworthy to him, which is why the stark color differences are chosen for the text.
Furthermore, in the short story the strange neighbor is also described with his hands inside his pockets, which is a display of suspicious behavior. This particular imagery is chosen precisely because of the statement “‘These are the daily questions I ask myself internally as I walk in public: Are my hands visible? Do I appear angry?’” (Owens, 2018) presented by the African American author Ernest Owens from a referenced ProQuest article. Certainly this sentence brings forth a direct and ultimate concern for our society’s poisonous mindset about people of color and minorities. This detail shows that people in general usually have a set view or impression of a person based on appearance even without knowing them personally yet, which is the choice is made to end the short story with Mark saying how his Lenses show him his “favorite colors” in order to display the predetermined bias he has unconsciously towards others.
Originally the thought was that maybe the Lenses could represent police and how they sometimes racially profile people based on looks since a big issue in modern day society is how many people of minorities are racially profiled on the road by police when asked to pull over their vehicle for a stop-and-frisk-like search. A Stanford racial profiling test conducted by researchers found that if the same standard were to be applied from white searches to blacks and hispanics, about thirty percent less blacks and fifty percent less hispanics, relative to their populations, would be even stopped in the first place (Andrews, 2016), and according to the Washington Post, blacks were found to be one to five times more likely to be searched after stopped (Soffen, 2016). However, in the story, this idea is seen instead through the subtle presence of two people arguing near a parked car as seen by Mark during the power outage chaos. The overall purpose of this is to portray that racial profiling can occur pretty much anytime and anywhere in today’s society, and not only on the roads; In a world where racial profiling happens all the time, such as at school and in public shops, or at Yale (Owens, 2018) and in a local Starbucks (Stevens 2018), people start to dehumanize each other (Yan, 2018).
Spectrum clearly displays the relevance of this topic through the way that everyone in Mark’s city goes about wearing the Lenses all day, everyday, and everywhere, including the chaos that ensues following the loss them. As a result, within the short story Spectrum, the claim that racism is a mindset is highlighted through the use of technological Lenses and a play on color to show how racism affects trustworthiness in today’s society.
Works Cited
Andrews, Edmund. "Stanford researchers develop new statistical test that shows racial
profiling in police traffic stops." Stanford News, Stanford University Communications, 28
statistical-test-shows-racial-profiling-police-traffic-stops/. Accessed 19 May 2018.
Owens, Ernest. "At Yale, Starbucks and Everywhere Else, being Black in America really is
this Hard." CNN Wire Service, May 10, 2018. ProQuest,
https://search.proquest.com/docview/2036803058?accountid=46162. Accessed 19 May
2018.
Soffen, Kim. "The big question about why police pull over so many black drivers." The
Washington Post, 8 July 2016,
police-pull-over-so-many-black-drivers/?utm_term=.a9885fd69a14. Accessed 19 May
2018.
Stevens, Matt. "Starbucks C.E.O. Apologizes After Arrests of 2 Black Men." The New York
Times, 15 Apr. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/us/starbucks-philadelphia-black-
men-arrest.html. Accessed 19 May 2018.
Yan, Holly. "This is why everyday racial profiling is so dangerous." CNN Wire, 12 May 2018.
Opposing Viewpoints In Context,
u=sylopacplus&sid=OVIC&xid=f3f9aa7a. Accessed 19 May 2018.
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