POC

In the modern usage, POC means People or Person Of Color.  It's supposed to be a convenient shorthand meaning a nonwhite person.

So it would appear that white is not a color.  I don't think that's really the case though.

Why am I bringing this up: I just responded to a request with the response, "That is a very white person thing to do."  The individual was asking for the return of an item that had been surrendered, ostensibly permanently.  Now he wanted it back.

The asker replied, "That is a racist thing to say."

And he's right.

Frankly any such statement that ascribes a pattern of behavior to an entire demographic is, at its core, racist.  Or classist or ageist or whatever -ist you want to apply, it's a blanket statement that is prejudicial in nature and often derogatory. 

In this case the statement wasn't without merit.  Native Americans' history with white settlers was rife with broken promises and altered contracts.  The old slur of "Indian giver" is actually backwards, possibly an attempt at deflecting guilt by projecting it.

It doesn't make it any less racist that I, an extremely white person with exclusively Northern European heritage, was the one ascribing such behavior to an entire segment of the population.   I made the statement feeling some shame at the behavior of my nation's forebears and wanting to express my derision for it, but in so doing gave myself a little stab in the conscience.  By calling out their transgressions, I committed one myself.

Perhaps I shouldn't take on such burdens.  My people didn't come over to this country until the late 1800s and early 1900s and were, by and large, farmers on the northern prairies.  I'm pretty sure we didn't do a lot of oppressing.  Both sides of my family seem to be folks who pretty much minded their own business.

It seems to me that it doesn't matter what your color is, it's a color.  We are all people of color.  In this context where I'm sitting right now I'm a member of a socially dominant majority, but I don't have to go very far at all to find myself in a small geographic area where I would absolutely NOT be in the majority - I would be respected as a guest but would have no political influence of any kind - not even a vote.   Or a little bit farther yet and I would be in another different minority entirely.

So I think it might be best if we could start seeing past colors.  It's a convenient way of categorizing people but it continues to divide us, and as we've already seen we don't need more of that.

The Student*

"Look, kid...you know, it isn't bad. I kind of like it. But it's so...big. Does it have to be so big?"  The youngster's project was kind of pretty.  But there could be no denying, it took up a lot of space.

"Yeah? It's a universe, universes are big!"

Light made a noise, if it could be called a noise, with her mouth, if it could be called a mouth. From one frame of reference she was immensely tall, softly rounded, and could be described as timelessly old. From another frame of reference - her own - these terms didn't really have much meaning.  

"Big," however, still had some context. Bigness wasn't limited to the mere three dimensions this upstart young god worked in. He hadn't even made much of an effort with time, he just set it in motion and watched the pretty waves it made.

These kids.

Some of these gods were pretty young indeed.  Some, and here she had to admit that she was a little impressed, willed themselves into being.  That was pretty cool, no denying, and even she wasn't entirely sure where, what, or how they came from.  They weren't and then they were.  Boom.  But they tended to be kind of abstracted about everything and went off on their own tangents and sometimes were never seen again.  Their versions of existential crises were extreme even for gods.

There were the old ones such as herself.  Beginning and End, Light and Dark, Love and Hate.  The dichotomies that defined not just universes, but Being and Nonbeing.  Mere universes were a catch in the breath to such things.  A hiccup.  There were even others who loomed largely, but diffuse, somewhere Light herself could only faintly glimpse.  She knew she was old, if she wanted to use a term like "old," but those fainter, greater entities made her feel like a tiny, glimmering spark that has only the faintest idea of what fire really is.  And in that context, what does a spark know of time?  If she was old and timeless, then what could the spark say about the fire that created it, and would endure long, long after the spark itself and had died and cooled to nothingness?

These thoughts made Light feel small but very safe.  She would shine as long as her spark lasted...and then there would be more sparks.

There were some gods who didn't will themselves, but were willed by others.  Those poor minds generally flared like a raging inferno that consumes its fuel before it has barely even begun, a chaotic explosion of self-hatred, rage, and confusion.  She felt terrible for each of them.  And there were so many, a constant foam of minds, crackling in and out of existence like lightning.

And Light felt terrible for each of them.  She consoled to the best of her ability, pitied as they became gradually madder, and mourned as they died, each and every one of them, flickering in and out, and out, and out.  Thousands upon thousands of hopeful, insane doomed young gods blinking into and out of existence with every breath.

Sometimes, Light held her breath for a few millennia.  It seemed to help.

This new fellow had peeled himself away from an older iteration of himself, who had taken one look at his new, vigorous younger self and promptly crumpled up and died.  The youngster had eaten his older self, greedily.  No one blamed him.  Few things are more nourishing to a young god than an old god.  It's not often that an old god will hold still long enough for someone to eat him.  You take the opportunity where you can.

Unfortunately he didn't seem to be quite as clever as his older self, and was relearning some of the lessons he had learned before.  Earlier younger selves had been down this path too, but of course he didn't remember that.  He never did.  Maybe sometime in the future he might, but not yet.   She decided to give him a nudge.  She almost always did, and it usually worked out well.

"Come here, youngster. Look close."

She pinched her fingers together, allowing them to be fingers the poor little fellow could understand. "Tell me what you see."

"Nothing. You're just pinching your fingers together."

"Hmpf. 'Fingers,' he says. Okay, so stipulated. Sure, they're fingers and they're together. What's between them?"

"Nothing."  His young, smooth features didn't crease with concentration at all.

"You think so?" She pressed her fingers together tighter. "What about now? Is there less nothing now than there was a moment ago?"

"Uh, no. Nothing is nothing, you can't have less nothing."

"Ha! You'd think that. But no. Why don't infinities go both ways?"

"What, you mean like negative infinity?"

"No sweetie, that's just counting in the other direction. No, I mean infinity nothing."

"I don't think I understand that. Zero. Nothing. It isn't infinite at all."

"You're still thinking expansively, about bigness. You need to think about nothingness and how much room there is inside it, and how your big universe is actually kind of gaudy. Sure, it's pretty, but it has no elegance at all."

"I really don't understand how that's supposed to work."

"If I told you there were such a thing as a universe that existed for no time at all, would it exist?"

"If you tell me it exists, then it exists...right? Please throw me an easy one."

"That was the easy one, sweetie. It exists for no time at all. I say it is, so it is. But it has no time at all. So it isn't, too. It's nothing, but it's real."

"How does that even work?"

"Well, there's ways and ways. For instance we can just leave off the pesky time dimension like I suggested and there you are. You can't say it existed, or will exist, or does exist - these things are markers of time, and there is no time. So it's nothing, but it is."

"I still don't think I get it."

"Tell you what: get into the space between my fingers, and mull things over for a while."

"But there's, um. No space there. Right? There's nothing."

"You have to get into the nothing to get a better handle on what a universe is. If you're going to call something a universe, an entire collection of everything, you really need to get a handle on the other end of that spectrum: you need to explore the broader nature of nothing."

"How do I do that?"

Light sighed, a bosom of the faintest dawning rays rising and falling. Star systems whispered out of her mouth.

"Think it through, child. Concentrate on nothing whatsoever. I'll take this with me," she said, carefully tucking the new universe under one arm, "and check up on you later."

The young god did as he was told, because there was no arguing with Light. She was relentless, and worse - relentlessly right. But at least she was a little more open, a little more of a guide than her slightly older, much colder twin sister Dark.

Dark gave him the shivers.

Light knew how the youngster felt about Dark.  Sometimes she felt that way about Dark, too, a little.  But Dark wasn't bad, she was just infinity, like herself.  Dark was infinity counted in the other direction.  Once you appreciated that about her, she made a lot more sense.  Light understood this intrinsically.  Dark was her sister, misunderstood by far too many, and Light loved her.  Dark made Light lighter, just as she made Dark darker.  They were made for and by each other, and were never far apart.

She looked over the young universe carefully.  It was big, no doubt.  And the patterns of time inside it were pretty, there was no arguing about that.  She gave it a very gentle shake and watched the ripples course from one edge to the other, waves of causality and consequence merging, diffracting, finally diminishing to insignificance.  She set it to one side, giving it a tiny spin so she could enjoy the way it sparkled.  It was orderly with consistent math inside it that made it hum with pleasant harmonic overtones.  A little too logical to be truly beautiful, but it was very nice to look at.

The youngster had sat himself not too far away and appeared to be trying hard to not try hard.  She smiled at that, it was the one mistake they all made at the beginning.  Like the overtones of consistent math, that was a familiar constant in his presences.  She watched patiently, waiting while he went through usual cascade of epiphanies.  She knew what he was going through, having seen him go through it so many times before.

So he sat quietly, and concentrated hard on nothing. No, wait, concentrating was putting too much of something into it. Not concentrate...don't concentrate. Let it go. No, don't think about letting it go, just let it...not. Not go, not stay, just...not.

Light watched from a distance, if it could be called a distance. She held up her hand in front of her eye, bracketing the student with her thumb and finger so his image was framed between them. Slowly, she pressed them together.

When her fingertips parted again, there was nothing.

*I originally published this story as a response to a Writing Prompt on Reddit, but couldn't leave Light alone.  She had so much more to say in my mind, and I wanted to hear it a little more clearly.