Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (25 page)

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 color caste systems wherein the lighter one’s skin the greater one’s social value. Their surprise at the way color caste functioned in black life exposed the extent to which they chose to remain willfully ignorant of a system that white supremacist thinking had established and maintained. The construction of color 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 color 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 color caste systems are soon initiated when they have contact with other black people.

Issues of skin color 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 color 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 color 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 color, because of the correlation between skin color 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 internalized racism as regards skin color and beauty standards. Darker-skinned blacks, who had historically borne the brunt of devaluation based on color, 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 color 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 color-caste 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 color felt for the first time that it was politically appropriate to intervene. I remember when my siblings and I 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 color-caste hierarchies. This process of decolonization 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 internalized 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 color. 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 decolonization once many rights were gained. Many folks just assumed we had collectively resisted and altered color castes.

Few black activists were vigilant enough to see that concrete rewards for assimilation would undermine subversive oppositional 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 internalized 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 reestablished 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 radicalization 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 decolonization of our minds and imaginations central to their political agendas. They did not continually call for a focus on black self-love, on ending internalized 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 color-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 internalized racism. This hypocrisy also played a major role in creating a framework where color-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 decolonization, of internalized 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
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 internalized racism. Most of us continued to fight against the internalization of white supremacist thinking on whatever fronts we found ourselves. As a professor, I 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 internalized 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 institutionalize 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 internalized racism were most effectively launched by the mass media. Institutionalizing 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 internalized 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 color-caste hierarchy.

Color-caste hierarchies embrace both the issue of skin color 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 color-caste systems in white supremacist society has always had a gendered component. A mixture of racist and sexist thinking informs the way color-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 color 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 oppositional. And in many theaters black audiences loudly expressed their continued investment in color-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 valorize 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 color undermines our efforts to decolonize 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 color-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.