"I spent seven months in Africa and came back saying there isn't anything you can say about black people that you couldn't say about, say, pink people except that they're black"

Larry Rivers distills an anti-essentialist insight: after extended time in Africa, he concludes that the impulse to generalize about “black people” collapses under the weight of ordinary, heterogeneous human life. The wry substitution of “pink people” for white people turns the usual racial lens back on those often treated as raceless, exposing how color terms are arbitrary labels rather than meaningful descriptors of character, culture, or capacity. By asserting that the only difference is “that they’re black,” he pushes against exoticization and the presumption that phenotype encodes essence.

Embedded here is an acknowledgment of Africa’s vast pluralism. Seven months across any slice of the continent would reveal incompatible stereotypes sitting side by side: urban and rural, secular and devout, avant-garde art scenes and quiet domestic routines, bureaucracies, jokes, ambitions, failures, tenderness. The remark denies the fantasy that a single racial category can carry explanatory power for billions of lives. It gestures toward a humanistic universal: people are complicated before they are categorized. At the same time, it invites a caveat. Declaring sameness can slide into a colorblind stance that overlooks histories of colonization, structural inequality, and the specific pressures of anti-Black racism. Similarity in human nature does not erase asymmetry in conditions.

Rivers’s phrasing does a subtle double move: normalizing Black life as ordinary and unremarkable in the best sense, while racializing whiteness to unsettle its default status. It frames race as a surface phenomenon, visible, socially consequential, but not morally or psychologically determinative. The statement reads as a call to resist explanatory shortcuts and to replace curiosity about “difference” with attention to context, power, and personhood. Travel, in this telling, becomes corrective: not a search for the exotic, but an encounter with the familiar in unfamiliar places. The lesson is humility, let people be particular, and let color describe, not define.