Truer Colors?

I went for a hike Sunday at Cedar Ridge Preserve, a local Audubon Dallas-managed slice of Texas Hill Country, alight this day with our version of fall color. Among evergreen juniper and shaggy cedar, the oaks and sumac and elms were a riot in their bright yellows and oranges, reds and purples. What's amazing is that these colors have been there all along, just waiting for their chance to glow.

As naturalist Janet Lembke explains in her book Shake Them 'Simmons Down, "The colors seen in fall have always been present in the leaves, ever since they began to unfold. The yellow pigment, carotene, and the pigment for deep reds and purples, anthocyanin, lie beneath the green chlorophyll." Chlorophyll, we all know from junior high science, is key to the photosynthetic process whereby the tree generates energy. But, in the fall, as the weather cools, the tree begins to shut that process down and, as Lembke explains, "the connections of leaf stems to tree are sealed off. Deprived of its own supply of water, the chlorophyll disappears. And the underlying colors blaze."

Which reminds me of another writer on the oddities of chlorophyll. Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that "If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood ...."

So what?

Well. It makes me wonder if there is an autumnal effect for we humans, particularly those of us carrying white-skin privilege. (See link for a primer or Google "Peggy McIntosh" and "white privilege".) What is the equivalent for us, of chlorophyll dropping out of the leaves, and revealing our truer colors, the ones that have been there all along? Beneath the overwhelming wash of white -- so omnipresent to most of us white folks we don't even know we are swimming in it -- do we have truer colors? And if so, what are they?

My guesses would be the colors of deep awareness ... spookily brilliant insight ... oceanic compassion ... bright laughter ... and love. Passionate, shameless, let-righteousness-and-peace-kiss kind of love. (Psalm 85:10.)

What else? Is there anything hiding under your white skin, or the white skin of those you care about? What else could we see, if we weren't blinded by the white?

Of course, if our truer colors are revealed by some alchemical awakening, that doesn't mean we stop being white. It just means we are becoming truer, perhaps, to a wider and deeper sense of what it means to live in and through God's love.

I will always be white; I will always be handed white-skin privilege as long as there is such a thing. But it is also true that I will always be looking for my truer colors, too, the ones I feel burning in my heart.