Color Me White

Color Me White focuses on straight white males, and what is often called toxic masculinity—a topic only aggravated by the current political climate. As Just Buffalo Literary Center Artistic Director Barbara Cole writes in the afterword: From this first page, the single white male “makes eye contact with you,” the reader. Although, in other instances, this “you” feels like someone else (a former lover perhaps?), much of Color Me White operates by insisting the reader make eye contact with offensive and uncomfortable moments of 21stcentury life. … In addition to the text itself, Color Me White makes eye contact with the reader through the playful and provocative illustrations of Mickey Harmon. The very first image which accompanies the opening dinner party scene depicts a male figure with his mouth open as if in mid-speech, his eyebrows noticeably crooked as if to suggest that he’s not to be trusted. But the eyebrows are a mere detail. Whose gaze can resist zeroing in on the scruffy haired scrotum and penis standing in for his hand and arm?… Harmon’s visual pun announces, quite simply, that the single white male is, well, a dick. This is neither a gag nor a punchline but a literal reading. What unfolds over the next 80 pages is a stark critique—playful, yes, but critical at every turn—of the entitlement and privilege which inform white, patriarchal power structures.