GREY - by Precious Samuel

‎‎I have never been the target of outright racism, not in the personal, scarring way some people describe. What I have received instead are the quieter things: the prolonged stare across a room, the half-smile that does not reach the eyes, the mocking remark delivered just loud enough for me to hear. They come when I refuse to declare a side. When someone presses me to choose—black or white, this camp or that one—and I simply say I will not.‎I tell people I am a science-minded art lover. The phrase usually earns a laugh, as if the two cannot live in the same person. But it is more accurate than it sounds. Science taught me to hold multiple possibilities open until the evidence arrives. Art taught me to sit inside contradiction without needing to resolve it into a single clean answer. Both disciplines, at their best, are comfortable with uncertainty. Both, in their own ways, love the space between.‎Most of the world’s loudest fights are colour fights. Not the cheerful primary colours of a child’s palette, but the heavier ones: skin tone, political branding, ideological banners even languages , black and white thinking, feeling blue, grey minded . We are taught early that the world is clearest when it is reduced to opposites—black and white, right and wrong, us and them. ‎<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/grok_1789987096529.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;"/>‎Grey is treated as weakness, as fence-sitting, as a failure of courage. We are told that the middle is where cowards hide.‎I have never believed that. I am hopeful about grey. I prefer the in-between, the soft hour that is neither full day nor full night. Grey is not the absence of colour; it is every colour present at once, simply quieted and desaturated. It is the place where complexity is allowed to remain complex. Where a person does not have to collapse an entire self into one loud label in order to be understood.‎There is a cost to staying there. People grow impatient. They want the clean declaration, the team jersey, the hashtag that tells them exactly where you stand. When you decline, the looks come, the remarks, the quiet social penalties. It can feel lonely. Sometimes it feels safer to pretend you have chosen, just to make the staring stop. I have felt that temptation. I still feel it.‎Yet every time I almost step into one camp or the other, something in me resists. The resistance is not indecision. It is a quiet insistence that the world is larger than the two poles we keep being offered. Science does not advance by declaring loyalty to a single hypothesis and refusing to look at the rest. Art does not move anyone by insisting there is only one correct way to see. Both grow in the grey—the provisional, the unfinished, the still-possible.‎So I remain here. Not because I am above the fray, and not because I lack conviction. I remain because the grey feels more honest than the pure colours we are constantly urged to wear. It is the colour of the sky just before dawn and just after sunset. It is the colour of questions that have not yet hardened into answers. It is the colour I choose when the world demands black or white and I answer, softly but firmly, neither.‎I do not know if this makes complete sense to anyone else. I only know it is the place I can breathe.‎

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