Shade of Color

In August 2019, I arrived at Seda, a place that has always been so close yet so far from me. I was born in Chengdu, the capital city of the province where Seda rests and a place where three million Tibetans worship and live. However, Seda had remained an undiscovered place to me.

At a local school, I watched Sedan children practicing traditional art forms. Their smiles and their spirits were like the azaleas thriving on the prairie. It got me thinking about the way life works, and how different things could be with just the slightest change. What if I’d stayed in Tibet, and they’d gone on to international study? Would things turn out differently?

When I went back to my high school, I felt inspired to take photos of my peers. Despite coming from a host of racial and ethnic backgrounds, many of them shared a similar bone structure with the people I’d encountered in Tibet. Suddenly I was on a mission. I wanted to show how similar we all are under the skin, despite thousands of miles and vastly different upbringings. In the end I’d compiled photos from more than forty different people from all over the globe. Racial literacy is needed now more than ever, and yet race and skin tone remain the first things we see and often what we use when judging each other for the first time. How can something so simple as, “black,” “white,” “red,” or “yellow” possibly describe who we are and what we’ve experienced?