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No
social movement to end white supremacy addressed the issue of internalised
racism in relation to beauty as intensely as did the Black Power revolution of
the sixties. For a time, at least,
this movement challenged black folks to examine the psychic impact of white
supremacy. Reading Frantz Fanon and
Albert Memmi, our leaders begin to speak of colonization and the need to
decolonise our minds and imaginations. Exposing
the myriad ways white supremacy had assaulted our self-concept and our
self-esteem, militant leaders of black liberation struggle demanded that black
folks see ourselves differently-see self love as a radical political agenda.
That meant establishing a politics of representation which would both
critique and integrate ideals of personal beauty and desirability informed by
racist standards, and put in place progressive standards, a system of valuation
that would embrace a diversity of black looks.
Ironically,
as black leaders called into question racist defined notions of beauty, many
white folks expressed awe and wonder that there
existed
in segregated black life colour caste systems wherein the lighter one's skin the
greater one's social value. Their
surprise at the way colour caste functioned in black life exposed the extent to
which they chose to remain wilfully ignorant of a system that white supremacist
thinking had established and maintained. The construction of colour caste hierarchies by white
racists in nineteenth-century life is well documented in their history and
literature. That contemporary white
folks are ignorant of this history reflects the way the dominant culture seeks
to erase-and thus deny-this past. This
denial allows no space for accountability, for white folks in contemporary
culture to know and acknowledge the primary role whites played in the formation
of colour castes. All black folks,
even those who know very little if anything at all about North American history,
slavery, and reconstruction, know that racist white folks often treated
lighter-skinned black folks better than their darker counterparts, and that this
pattern was mirrored in black social relations. But individual black folks who grow to maturity in
all-white settings that may have allowed them to remain ignorant of colour caste
systems are soon initiated when they have contact with other black people.
Issues
of skin colour and caste were highlighted by militant black struggle for rights.
The slogan "black is beautiful" worked to intervene and alter
those racist stereotypes that had always insisted black was ugly, monstrous,
undesirable. One of the primary
achievements of Black Power movement was the critique and in some instances the
dismantling of colour caste hierarchies. This
achievement often goes unnoticed and undiscussed, largely because it took place
within the psyches of black folks, particularly those of us from working-class
or poor backgrounds who did not have access to public forums where we could
announce and discuss how we felt. Those
black folks who came of age before Black Power faced the implications of colour
caste either through devaluation or overvaluation.
In other words, to be born light meant that one was born with an
advantage recognized by everyone. To
be born dark was to start life handicapped, with a serious disadvantage.
At the onset of the contemporary feminist movement, I had only recently
stopped living in a segregated black world and begun life in predominantly white
settings. I remember encountering white female insistence that when a child is
coming out of the womb one's first concern is to identify its gender, whether
male or female; I called attention to the reality that the initial
concern
for most black parents is skin colour, because of the correlation between skin
colour and success.
Militant
black liberation struggle challenged this sensibility.
It made it possible for black people to have an ongoing public discourse
about the detrimental impact of internalised racism as regards skin colour and
beauty standards. Darker-skinned
blacks, who had historically borne the brunt of devaluation based on colour,
were recognized as having been wronged by assaultive white supremacist,
aesthetic values. New beauty standards were set that sought to value and
embrace the different complexions of blackness.
Suddenly, the assumption that each individual black person would also
seek a lighter partner was called into question. When our militant, charismatic, revolutionary leader Malcolm
X chose to marry a darker-skinned woman, he set different standards.
These changes had a profound impact on black family life.
The needs of children who suffered various forms of discrimination and
were psychologically wounded in families or public school systems because they
were not the right colour could now be addressed.
For example, parents of a dark-skinned child who, when misbehaving at
school, was called a devil and unjustly punished now had recourse in material
written by black psychologists and psychiatrists documenting the detrimental
effects of the colourcast system. In
all areas of black life the call to see black as beautiful was empowering.
Large numbers of black women stopped chemically straightening their hair
since there was no longer any stigma attached to wearing one's hair with its
natural texture. Those folks who
had often stood passively by while observing other black folks being mistreated
on the basis of skin colour felt for the first time that it was politically
appropriate to intervene. I remember when my siblings and 1 challenged our
grandmother, who could pass for white, about the disparaging comments she made
about dark-skinned people, including her grandchildren. Even though we were in a small Southern town, we were deeply
affected by the call to end colour-caste hierarchies.
This process of decolonisation created powerful changes in the lives of
all black people in the United States. It
meant that we could now militantly confront and change the devastating
psychological consequences of internalised racism.
Even
when collective militant black struggle for self-determination began to wane,
alternative ways of seeing blackness and defining beauty continued to flourish.
These changes diminished as assimilation became
the
process by which black folks could successfully enter the mainstream.
Once again, the fate of black folks rested with white power.
If a black person wanted a job and found it easier to get it if she or
he did not wear a natural hairstyle, this was perceived by many to be a
legitimate reason to change. And of
course many black and white folks felt that the gain in civil rights, racial
integration, and the lifting of many long-standing racial taboos (for example,
the resistance to segregated housing and interracial relationships) meant that
militant struggle was no longer needed. Since
freedom for black folks had been defined as gaining the rights to enter
mainstream society, to assume the values and economic standing of the white
privileged classes, it logically followed that it did not take long for
interracial interaction in the areas of education and jobs to reinstitutionalize,
in less overt ways, a system wherein individual black folks who were most like
white folks in the way they looked, talked, and dressed would find it easier to
be socially mobile. To some extent,
the dangers of assimilation to white standards were obscured by the assumption
that our ways of seeing blackness had been fundamentally changed.
Aware black activists did not assume that we would ever return to social
conditions where black folks would once be grappling with issues of colour.
While leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, George Jackson and many
others repeatedly made the issue of self-love central to black liberation
struggle, new activists did not continue the emphasis on decolonisation once
many rights were gained. Many folks
just assumed we had collectively resisted and altered colour castes.
Few
black activists were vigilant enough to see that concrete rewards for
assimilation would undermine subversive appositional ways of seeing blackness.
Yet racial integration meant that many black folks were rejecting the
ethic of communalism that had been a crucial survival strategy when racial
apartheid was the norm. They were
embracing liberal individualism instead.
Being free was seen as having the right to satisfy individual desire
without accountability to a collective body.
Consequently, a black person could not feel that the way one wore one's
hair was not political but simply a matter of choice.
Seeking to improve class mobility, to make it in the white world, black
folks begin to backtrack and assume once again the attitudes and values of
internalised racism. Some folks
justified their decisions to compromise and assimilate to white aesthetic
standards by seeing it as simply "wearing the mask" to get over.
This was
best
typified by those black females who wore straight, white-looking wigs to work
covering a natural hairdo. Unfortunately,
black acceptance of assimilation meant that a politics of representation
affirming white beauty standards was being re-established as the norm.
Without
an organized, ongoing, and collective movement for black self-determination,
militant black critical thinkers and activists begin to constitute a subculture.
A revolutionary militant stance, one that seriously critiqued
capitalism and imperialism, was no longer embraced by the black masses.
Given these circumstances, the radicalisation of a leader such as Martin
Luther King, Jr. went unnoticed by most black folks: his passionate critiques of
militarism and capitalism were not heard. King
was instead remembered primarily for those earlier stages of political work
where he supported a bourgeois model of assimilation and social mobility.
Those black activists who remained in the public eye did not continue a
militant critique and interrogation of white standards of beauty.
While radical activists such as Angela Davis had major public forums,
continued to wear natural hair, and be black identified, they did not make the
ongoing decolonisation of our minds and imaginations central to their political
agendas. They did not continually
call for a focus on black self-love, on ending internalised racism.
Towards
the end of the seventies, black folks were far less interested in calling
attention to beauty standards. No
one interrogated radical activists who begin to straighten their hair.
Heterosexual black male leaders openly chose their partners and spouses
using the standards of the caste-caste system.
Even during the most militant stages of black power movement, they had
never really stopped allowing racist notions of beauty to define female
desirability, yet they preached a message of self love and an end to
internalised racism. This hypocrisy
also played a major role in creating a framework where colour-caste systems
could once again become the accepted norm.
The
resurgence of interest in black self-determination, as well as of overt white
supremacism, created in the eighties a context where attention could be given to
the issue of decolonisation, of internalised racism.
The mass media carried stories about the fact that black children had low
self-esteem, that they preferred white images over black ones, that black girls
liked white dolls better than black ones. This
news was all presented with awe, as though there was no political context for
the repudiation and
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devaluation
of blackness. Yet the politics of
racial assimilation had always operated as a form of backlash, intended to
undermine black self-determination. Not
all black people had closed our eyes to this reality.
However, we did not have the access to the mass media and public forums
that would have allowed us to launch a sustained challenge to internalised
racism. Most of us continued to
fight against the internalisation of white supremacist thinking on whatever
fronts we found ourselves. As a professor, 1 interrogated these issues in classrooms
and as a writer in my books.
Nowadays,
it is fashionable in some circles to mock Black Power struggle and see it solely
as a failed social movement. It is
easy for folks to make light of the slogan "black is beautiful." Yet
this mockery does not change the reality that the interrogation of internalised
racism embedded in this slogan and the many concrete challenges that took place
in all areas of black life did produce radical changes, even though they were
undermined by white supremacist backlash.
Most folks refuse to see the intensity of this backlash, and place
responsibility on radical black activists for having too superficial an agenda.
The only justifiable critique we can make of militant black liberation
struggle is its failure to institutionalise sustained strategies of critical
resistance. Collectively and
individually, we must all assume accountability for this failure.
White
supremacist capitalist patriarchal assaults on movements for black
self-determination aimed at ending internalised racism were most effectively
launched by the mass media. Institutionalising
a politics of representation which included black images, thus ending years of
racial segregation, while reproducing the existing status quo, undermined black
self-determination. The affirmation of assimilation as well as of racist white
aesthetic standards, was the most effective means to undermine efforts to
transform internalised racism in the psyches of the black masses.
When these racist stereotypes were coupled with a concrete reality
where assimilated black folks were the ones receiving greater material reward,
the culture was ripe for a resurgence of colour-caste hierarchy.
Colour-caste
hierarchies embrace both the issue of skin colour and hair texture.
Since lighter-skinned black people are most often genetically connected
to intergenerational pairings of both white and black people, they tend to look
more like whites. Females who were the offspring of generations of
interracial mixing were more likely to have long, straight hair. The exploitative and oppressive nature of colour-caste sys-
P.179.
tems
in white supremacist society has always had a gendered component.
A mixture of racist and sexist thinking informs the way caste-caste hierarchies
detrimentally affect the lives of black females differently from black males.
Light skin and long, straight hair continue to be traits that define a
female as beautiful and desirable in the racist white imagination and in the
colonized black mind set. Darker-skinned
black females work to develop positive self-esteem in a society that continually
devalues their image. To this day,
the images of black female bitchiness, evil temper, and treachery continue to be
marked by darker skin. This is the stereotype called "Sapphire"; no light
skin occupies this devalued position. We
see these images continually in the mass media whether they be presented to us
in television sitcoms (such as the popular show Martin), on cop shows, (the
criminal black woman is usually dark), and in movies made by black and white
directors alike. Spike Lee
graphically portrayed the conflict of skin colour in his film School Daze, not
via male characters but by staging a dramatic fight between light skinned women
and their darker counterparts. Merely
exploiting the issue, the film is neither critically subversive nor
appositional. And in many theatres
black audiences loudly expressed their continued investment in caste-caste
hierarchies by "dissing" darker-skinned female characters.
Throughout
the history of white supremacy in the United States, racist white men have
regarded the biracial female as a sexual ideal. In this regard, black men have taken their cues from white
men. Stereotypically portrayed as
embodying a passionate sensual eroticism as well as a subordinate feminine
nature, the biracial black woman has been and remains the standard other black
females are measured against. Even
when darker-skinned black women are given "play" in films, their characters
are usually subordinated to lighter skinned females who are deemed more
desirable. For a time, films that
portrayed the biracial black woman as a "tragic mulatto" were passé,
but contemporary films such as the powerful drama One False Move return this
figure to center stage. The impact
of militant black liberation struggle had once called upon white dominated
fashion magazines and black magazines to show diverse images of black female
beauty. In more recent times,
however, it has been acceptable simply to highlight and valorise the image of
the biracial black woman. Black
women models such as Naomi Campbell find that they have a greater crossover
success if their images are altered by long, straight
wigs,
weaves, or bonded hair so that they resemble the "wannabes" - folks
who affirm the equation of whiteness with beauty by seeking to take on the
characteristic look of whiteness. This
terrain of "drag" wherein the distinctly black-looking female is made
to appear in a constant struggle to transform herself into a white female is a
space only a brown-skinned black woman can occupy.
Biracially black women already occupied a distinctly different, more
valued place within the beauty hierarchy. As
in the days of slavery and racial apartheid, white fascination with racial
mixing once again determines the standard of valuation, especially when the
issue is the valuation of female bodies. A
world that can recognize the dark-skinned Michael Jordan as a symbol of black
beauty scorns and devalues the beauty of Tracy Chapman.
Black male pop icons mock her looks.
And while folks comment on the fact that light-skinned and biracial
women have become the stars of most movies that depict black folks, no one has
organized public forums to talk about the way this mass media focus on colour
undermines our efforts to decolonise our minds and imaginations.
Just as whites now privilege lighter skin in movies and fashion
magazines, particularly with female characters, folks with darker skin face a
media that subordinates their image. Dark
skin is stereotypically coded in the racist, sexist, or colonized imagination
as masculine. Hence, a male's power
is enhanced by dark looks while a female's dark looks diminish her femininity.
Irrespective of people's sexual preferences, the caste-caste hierarchy
functions to diminish the desirability of darker skinned females.
Being seen as desirable does not simply affect one's ability to attract
partners; it enhances class mobility in public arenas, in educational systems
and in the work force.
The
tragic consequences of caste-caste hierarchy are evident among the very young
who are striving to construct positive identity and healthy self-esteem.
Black parents testify that black children learn early to devalue dark
skin. One black mother in an
interracial marriage was shocked when her four-year-old girl expressed the
desire that her mom be white like herself and her dad.
She had already learned that white was better.
She had already learned to negate the blackness in herself.
In high schools all around the United States, darker-skinned black girls
must resist the socialization that would have them see themselves as ugly if
they are to construct healthy self-esteem.
That means they must resist the efforts of peers to devalue them.
This is just one of the tragic implications
P.181.
of
black reinvestment in colour-caste hierarchies. Had there never been a shift in colour consciousness among
black people, no one would have paid special attention to the reality that many
black children seem to be having as much difficulty learning to love blackness
in this racially integrated time of multiculturalism as folks had during periods
of intense racial apartheid. Kathe
Sandler's documentary film A Question of Colour examines the way black
liberation politics of the sixties challenged colour caste even as she shows
recent images of activists who returned to conventional racist defined notions
of beauty. Even though Sandler does
not offer suggestions and strategies for how we can deal with this problem now,
this film is an important intervention because it brings the issue back into
public discourse.
To
describe the problems of colour caste we must address it politically as a
serious crisis of consciousness if we are not to return to an old model of class
and caste where those blacks who are most privileged will be light-skinned or
biracial, acting as mediators between the white world and a disenfranchised,
disadvantaged mass of black folks with dark skin.
Right now there is a new wave of young, well-educated biracial folks who
identify as black and who benefit from this identification both socially and
when they enter the work force. Although
they realize the implicit racism when they are valued more by whites than
darker-skinned blacks, the ethic of liberal individualism sanctions this
opportunism. Ironically, they may be among those who critique colour caste
even as they accept the perks that come from the culture's reinvestment in
caste-caste hierarchies. Until
black folks begin collectively to critique and question the politics of
representation that systematically devalues blackness, the devastating effects
of colour caste will continue to inflict psychological damage on masses of
black folks. To intervene and
transform those politics of representation informed by colonialism, imperialism,
and white supremacy, we have to be willing to challenge mainstream culture's
efforts to “erase racism" by suggesting it does not really exist.
Recognizing the power of mass media images to define social reality, we
need lobbyists in the government, as well as organized groups who sponsor
boycotts in order to create awareness of these concerns and to demand change.
Progressive nonblack allies in struggle must join the effort to call
attention to internalised racism. Everyone
must break through the wall of denial that would have us believe a hatred of
blackness emerges from
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troubled individual psyches and acknowledge that it is systematically taught through processes of socialization in white supremacist society. We must acknowledge, too, that black folks who have internalised white supremacist attitudes and values are as much agents of this socialization as their racist nonblank counterparts. Progressive black leaders and critical thinkers committed to a politics of cultural transformation that would constructively change the lot of the black underclass and thus positively impact the culture as a whole need to make decolonising our minds and imagination central when we educate for critical consciousness. Learning from the past, we need to remain critically vigilant, willing to interrogate our work as well as our habits of being to ensure that we are not perpetuating internalised racism. Note that more conservative black political agendas, such as the Nation of Islam and certain strands of Afro centrism, are the only groups who make self-love central, and as a conscience capture the imagination of a mass black public. Revolutionary struggle for black self-determination must become a real part of our lives if we want to counter conservative thinking and offer life-affirming practices to black folks daily wounded by white supremacist assaults. Those wounds will not heal if left unattended.