Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me…

Unless you are looking to get hurt by them.

Some news coverage here in Atlanta the past few days has focused on MARTA’s choice of names for its renaming of the MARTA lines in an effort to make them more user-friendly. Seems the MARTA folks – following in the footsteps of other major urban centers like NYC and London – chose to go with a basic color scheme of red, green, yellow, and blue as labels for the MARTA lines. Who could have an issue with that?

It’s apparently not as simple as primary colors. See, the yellow line goes into an area that has a large Asian population... And, clearly, MARTA is, at best, ignorant that it is making an allusion to the skin color of the residents of that area or, at worst, making an intentionally snide statement about the residents of that area... (Yes, you can read some sarcasm into that “clearly.”)

It’s just the yellow line creating the brouhaha. No one is asserting any racial association with the red line or political association with the green or blue lines. (Granted, there’s not a large Native American population in Atlanta; but the red line does run north to a pretty Republican area, and the green line runs through some of the most liberal, crunchy areas of Atlanta.)

And it apparently doesn’t matter that the yellow line goes through predominantly white neighborhoods and ends in a predominantly black area and that the same area highly populated by Asians is also highly populated by folks of various other ethnic backgrounds (lots of Spanish-speaking folks from various other Spanish-speaking countries there, too). No, clearly, if the yellow line goes to a neighborhood with a large Asian population, Asians should be offended because someone is pejoratively referencing their skin color. (And you can read some sarcasm into that “clearly,” too.)

Is the word “yellow” so politically loaded in this day and age that a primary color cannot be just a primary color? Seriously, I’m really asking. I mean, the other lines are red, green, and blue, people; they’re not red and yellow, black and white.

And what if they were red and yellow, black and white?

Even if there is some racial implication to the word “yellow” (and I will concede that there is), few people now living were around during the time that terms like “yellow peril” were being thrown around. I myself grew up singing Jesus Loves the Little Children, which talks about that particular spiritual leader finding all children “red and yellow, black and white” precious in his sight. And not too long ago, during the inauguration of a certain national leader, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, quoting a famous Civil Rights Era mantra, prayed for God to “help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

Nonetheless, Helen Kim, advocacy director for the nonprofit Pan Asian Center commented, “If a line going to the south side of the city was named the black line, I think you’d have a different outcome.”

Helen, Helen, Helen. I am not so sure. First of all, let’s be clear that MARTA is using primary colors, and, to be technically correct, black is not a primary color. Second, of the eight termination points for existing MARTA lines, five are in predominantly black areas, so singling out one line and calling it the “black line” couldn’t reasonably be interpreted as making some statement about the race of the population living at the end point of that line, intentionally or otherwise. Finally, Helen’s so wrapped up in what she views as the pejorative nature of the word “yellow” as a skin tone reference that she forgets that there’s no similar connotation with the word “black.”

I think I’ll side with Gary Gung (who, for the record, is Asian): “What difference does it make if it’s yellow, gold or black. Make the issue about the economy or something else more important.”

In my book, a yellow MARTA line is a yellow MARTA line.

To give credit where credit is due, my quotes from Ms. Kim and Mr. Gung come from this morning’s front-page Atlanta Journal Constitution article by Christian Boone.