Gold Gates

The loss of color began when men took over our world… and not the men of color. It was the color of white and gold. Was gold even a true color? It happened as people of color became scared to step outside of their homes, and the harder we fought back against the oppression, the more the color disappeared from the city. We were a state of color, but now we fade away because not only have we lost, but those who stood for the white and gold did not know their limits. And now, the state suffers just like the rest.

Most people tried to prevent the white and gold by fighting back, but it was a challenge. They fought with their words, on social media, at protests, and in their workplaces, even when the white and gold fought back with physical weapons. Friends, family, colleagues, and even strangers joined us in the fight. We resisted while others encouraged the fade daily, weekly, and monthly until all of the color was gone. It was a time when the community still had the courage to look the white and gold in the eye, to challenge the disappearance of our identities with the sole force of our presence. We believed that if we just showed up loudly enough, the tide would turn, and our red, white, and blue city would remain, but the tide did not turn. The fade was relentless, eating away at our parks, our murals, and the lively art that used to define our neighborhoods. Even during the standstill of 2020, when the entire world stopped, there was a little light that kept us going. Our tears were a sparkling shade, reflecting the color deep inside us.

Even on sunny days, the world remains entirely grey without warmth in the golden white. I remember the feeling back in 2016 when we laughed this off, thinking the white and gold takeover was actually impossible. The people of color thought we were crazy, but I always knew it was a possibility—a possibility before it became our colorless reality. Ten years later, and we are still living in the “impossible” white and gold.

High above the grey streets, the rich and colorless live day-to-day believing there are no issues. They walk through their sterile, shimmering white and gold streets convinced that money has “cured” the city’s problems. To them, poverty and the people of color are just diseases they have successfully erased. They believe their wealth protects them, even as they take away our water, our jobs, and our color. They look out over the city and see a clean, perfect world, completely blind to the devastation they leave behind.

In their minds, the absence of diversity is a sign of progress, a symbol of a society that has reached peak efficiency. They walk down the “clean streets” without a second thought to the cracked concrete below. They buy bottled water while the taps in our rural and soon to be inner city neighborhoods run dry. They go to their corporate offices while our livelihoods are dismantled piece by piece. The gold they surround themselves with is bright, blinding, and white. It offers no warmth, no joy, and no human connection. It is merely a symbol of their dominance, a marker of the separation between those who rule and those who suffer. Just. Like. Me. They sit in their glass windowed towers, sipping their “colored” drinks and looking down at a world they turned into a monochromatic wasteland. They do not care about the people of color who helped build this state. To them, we are simply a number, an inconvenient truth that they have managed to sweep under the rug. Just like they will the rest of the world soon enough. They treat the world as a blank canvas meant only for their white and gold wealth.

Then the silence is broken by the harsh media buzz of our phones, but unfortunately never by the broadcaster. “Breaking News… this just in…” Another center is being built. The news hits the community on the daily like another cold wave, and the terror sets in always. People are now too afraid to even step outside their homes. Those who are forced out are relocated thousands of miles away, tearing families apart and leaving the community shattered and colorless.

In the tiny living rooms of our neighborhoods, the televisions show images of the new construction along with the cost of it all. We watch the colorless planes, weapons, and machines roll in. A quiet, dreadful silence settles into the chests of every family in the neighborhood. Mothers hold their children closer, older children hold their parents close. All whispering words of false comfort, while the colored look toward the door with an unspoken fear that they will be the next to be taken. The fear is not just about losing our physical homes… It is about losing the remaining pieces of our shared culture. The centers represent a complete 180 from the life we once knew. To leave means to be erased entirely, to become just another forgotten face in a sea of the colorless.

Here is the truth... we knew exactly what this was. We knew this was a bulldozer that the white and gold were using to completely take over. But we had no choice. At first, our voices and our color were not loud enough. When the color started to show up, we worried it might be too late, but we did not let that stop us. We did not stop showing up. We continued to fight through the rapid changes, holding the line in a world that wanted us to fade into the background.

Every day, the grey streets become a little more hostile, yet every morning we went to work. We step out in our old, faded clothes that carry the ghosts of our past. We look each other in the eye, and we make ourselves visible. We bring out our memories, the only colorful things left in a world stripped of its color. We stand outside the gold gates, not because it is safe, but because we refuse to let them write us out of history. We are a silenced, resilient force, finding power in our numbers and in our shared determination to survive.

Gold used to mean so much more, but only to the wealth, never to the people of color. Because they took all the color away.

Tacky gold and white was the new color. Land of the free, “red, white and blue” because of the brave, but now we are white and gold and dead because of the rich.