Nice Day for a White Wedding

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of watching Skin starring the wonderful Sophie Okonedo. The mixed race British actress portrays Sandra Laing, a Coloured South African woman born to “white[1]” Afrikaner parents in the late 1950’s. Coloured is a term used in South Africa to describe any person of mixed race. Sandra Laing ‘s father famously and successfully fought the Nationalist (that’s code for racist) government of South Africa to have his daughter classified as white like he and his wife the only problem was Sandra didn’t remotely look white. Her head was covered with tightly coiled kinky hair and her skin was a beautiful café au lait and while the government and her immediate family recognized her as white no one else did. Her parents in an effort “help” her fit in bought skin lighteners and hair straighteners, none of which were effective in the long term. She had few white friends and the white boys her age didn’t want to date her. At 14/15 she ran away with a black South African man, was thrown in jail for 3 months for breaking the country’s strict laws against miscegenation, was released and subsequently had two children by this black man. She was disowned by her family.

Upon watching the film for the first time I felt anger towards Sandra’s parents for ignoring the obvious, Sandra wasn’t white! No amount of fighting, racial classification or skin lightener was going to change that fact. Their blindness and ignorance doomed Sandra to the miserable childhood and adolescence she ultimately led because they refused to be realistic about the appearance of their child.

Then I watched the film again and thought though I hated her parents’ politics, they were staunch members of the Nationalist party who were the authors and enforcers of Apartheid, they ultimately wanted the best life for Sandra. If Sandra were declared Coloured she could be taken from them to be raised by strangers, she would not be able to attend the best schools, vote, live in certain areas, or hold certain jobs. Hell, she wouldn’t even be allowed to sit in public places or drink from public fountains set aside for whites. With that in mind I started thinking, maybe her father was on to something.

It’s Monday night and I am still thinking… how would I feel if a child I’d born looked nothing like me racially? I am chocolate brown, as chocolate as they come, with a head covered with the same tightly coiled kinky hair as Sandra’s. If my child were born with straight blonde hair, light skin and blue eyes I don’t know what I’d do. I know I’d love him or her but I can’t say I wouldn’t slightly resent their appearance. My people fought (and are still fighting) very hard to accept dark skin as beautiful. Hell, I fought very hard to accept my own dark skin as beautiful and now I am downright conceited about it! If my children were “white looking” how alien would that feel to me? Everywhere we’d go there’d be questions, looks and stares. I’d have to impart a sense of pride in African/African American culture and history to children who do not wear their Africanity on the outside as I do. Do I continuously drill into their heads that despite their appearance they are black and would this give them some sort of inferiority complex about their skin color? Would they wish they looked blacker? How would this govern their interactions with other blacks and/or whites?

I know some of you reading this are probably thinking I am over analyzing the issue, and perhaps I am, but if I don’t decide how to deal with this issue society will. I have a multitude of friends of various backgrounds and some of them are in interracial relationships. A friend from college is white and married to an Asian man and their children look Asian. How does she feel about that? What does it say on the kids’ birth certificate? I have African American friends married to white spouses and their children either look mixed race or black. How does that make their white spouses feel? Then I have a friend back home whose two sons from her previous marriage to a white man look… Native American or Latino at best but not mixed race and certainly not black. You should see the stares she gets because these boys look nothing like her. When asked what do the boys say they are? I also have friends who are biracial and multiracial or just look like they’re mixed when they aren’t. People can’t rest until they find out what they are and will go to various lengths to find out.

Call it xenophobia but I want my children’s appearance to reflect my racial background regardless of my spouse’s race. Some of us like to act like that race doesn’t matter, and really it shouldn’t, but it does. It is a political statement as much as it is a statement about one’s ancestry. It helps to shape one’s frame of reference in this world by both positive and negative experiences and it can unite or separate people. Lastly, if you don’t choose someone else will always choose for you… whether it’s right or wrong. So how do we transcend this thing called race and just see people? Is it even possible? Is it wise? Does skin color or ancestry dictate race? How do or did you choose? What say you dear friends of many races in various interracial, multi-ethnic relationships? I am really curious to find out what you think…

[1] Genetic tests were done on Sandra Laing’s parents and both of them were discovered to have African ancestry though neither of them claimed to know of any such ancestors. Interestingly, Sandra’s youngest brother, like her, also looked more Coloured than white.

After the Afterglow… Waiting with Baited Breath (Me and Barack Obama's Presidency)

It’s been almost two weeks since we elected our first African American president, Barack Obama, and I’m feeling like I feel after I’ve had sex with someone for the very first time. “Does he feel the same way about me as I feel about him?” “Did we rush into this?” “Did we know enough about each other to take this step?” “Is he the one?”

Now I know some folks, black and white, see Barack Obama as the “second coming,” but I’ve been through this sort of thing before… falling for the dream and not the man. I still have high hopes for my relationship with Barack Obama and the Obama presidency but relationships of politics past keep haunting me. There was Washington DC’s former mayor Marion Berry smoking crack with his mistress while in office, former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson taped saying he’d like to cut off Barack Obama’s nuts and having a love child with his mistress, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s affair with his chief of staff then perjuring himself in court about it in addition to a federal investigation into his possible tax evasion and funds misappropriation and last but not least, Clarence Thomas who sexually harassed Anita Hill only to still be appointed a Supreme Court Justice who not only opposes Affirmative Action but is one of the most conservative judges on the bench. I could go on but I won’t (and for the record Colin Powell was on this list of disappointments with the outright lies he told the United Nations to invade Iraq but he redeemed himself recently with his admonishment of the Republican Party’s hate mongering and his open support of Barack Obama).

Yes, I know white politicians have their fair share of scandals but I don’t have a relationship with them. I do feel though that I have a special relationship with these African American politicians because by and large it was our, MY, community that supported and elected them. And every time they do something to dishonor their office and position they dishonor our ancestors, themselves, their families and every person of African descent. I know it is a heavy cross to bear but that is the reality of the situation. One misstep by these politicians is all the racists (some blatant and some closeted) needed to justify their beliefs that we are inherently inferior to them, that we lack the ability to lead and think rationally and that to be criminal is our nature. So, I worry about an Obama presidency because one misstep by him or his administration could set us back another 15 – 30 years in our struggle to gain economic and political power in this country. The effects would be devastating and far reaching in both the public and private sectors. (You think the systematic dismantling of Affirmative Action is bad... you ain't seen nothin' yet!)

So, I sit back, wait and watch patiently, taking note of who Barack chooses for his cabinet because you can tell a lot about a man by who he chooses to surround himself with. Grandma says, “Birds of a feather flock together, Crows and Canaries don’t hang.” Truer words were never spoken! So far I like his first choice, his wife, an educated, successful, dark skinned African American woman. A sho’ nuff sistah! Not bad, not bad at all... if all of his choices could be this good…


Signed,
Waiting with Baited Breath

Black Like Me... and Leon

I was going to write about love and sex, two of my favorite topics but, instead I am going to write about Leon Walter Tillage. When I saw his book lying on a table with other donated books for my teens (whom I teach dance to) I instantly knew that no one was going to pick the book up but me. The book entitled, “Leon’s Story,” is the coming of age story of Leon Walter Tillage who grew up in the rural segregated South but that’s not the reason why I knew no one would dare pick up his book. It was the cover, his picture, a black and white photograph of a smiling young black boy no more than 11 years old with coffee colored skin much like my own. You see, we are conditioned as black people to reject images of ourselves, anything that shows our blackness or some would say African ancestry and Leon is BLACK (definitely of African descent).

I watched my children, class of teenagers, run eagerly to the table of donated books to make their selections then gleefully choose several books. After they were done I was invited to make my own selections and I did, there was one by H.G. Wells, another one called, “A Fungus among Us,” and still another about African American women. When I saw Leon at first glance I gave it a pass. I thought it was about a child living in rural Africa and I wasn’t interested. I considered myself pretty well informed on the subject and it held no interest for me and, to be quite honest, I thought it was going to be about how (insert bad fake African accent here) he was so poor but happy and how men came to his village to build an irrigation ditch and a school, etc… you know, the typical portrait of a child growing up in rural Africa.

As I was walking away with my selections, my supervisor invited me to take more books that were left over and so I took more books… one about a child growing up in Nazi Germany and a couple more about a young black girl and her mother and finally…, “Leon’s Story.” I picked it up out of guilt and shame because as much as I mentally mocked what I thought this book was about the real reason I didn’t want to pick up this book was because I didn’t want to read the story of the little black boy who so very much looked like me. See, I can dance around the issue all I want but the truth of the matter is that at first glance I saw nothing beautiful in Leon’s photograph. I thought it was average and lacked anything remarkable. Instantly, I felt ashamed because I was passing this book by for the same reason the children were because he is so… BLACK.

Now my friends and other people who know me will probably find my statements shocking because not only do I have an African name (Swahili, to be exact) and practice a traditional African (Yoruba) belief system but I also study traditional African dance. I don’t hide from the sun, I revel in it and can be often overheard saying, “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice…” I mean, I am supposed to be the poster child of a healthy African (black) identity but, I am not. I am a product of this society and our culture just like everyone else and my psyche, like yours, has taken a beating.

Growing up dark skinned in America is rough, a hard knock life. Thankfully, I came into the world in the 70’s after we discovered “Black is Beautiful” but, even that had taken a back seat in our consciousness when I was growing up. In the 80’s my skin color was the topic of many conversations and the source of many insults from BLACK FOLKS. A male cousin told me I was too dark to be a cheerleader and another time when I and some other cousins were playing in my aunt’s makeup I was told I looked pretty because the makeup made me “not look so dark.” Neighborhood kids made comments about me playing in the sun, “‘cause I would get too black.” Boys would say “ugh… she’s too black,” then secretly want me to be their girlfriend. And when someone wanted to insult you they merely had to call you black or African. The only way for a dark skinned child, female or male, to escape this cruelty was to have “good hair” (long, straight, wavy or curly hair) or “pretty eyes” (blue, green, gray or hazel would do just fine). I used to stare in the sun, risking blindness, so that when someone walking past saw my eyes they appeared to be hazel.

Our objects of beauty and affection were anyone who was light skinned preferably with “good hair” and “pretty eyes.” It didn’t matter if they were cute or not they had met the basic requirement for beauty if they had any of the aforementioned physical characteristics. Seriously, I have seen some butt ugly folks be called attractive because they were merely light skinned and whatnot. If you were fortunate enough to be dark skinned and thought of as attractive people “qualified” your beauty by saying, “she’s cute to be so black.”

Now, amongst whites I fared no better. My first real interaction with whites came when I was in junior high and before that I mainly experienced them through TV (where girls nee children like me were nearly absent). In junior high I felt invisible to whites so I did my best to impress them. I talked about heavy metal and rock (which I really did love) and chatted them up about anything else I could think of but I still remained largely ignored. I was caught between a rock and hard place so, I developed a pretty healthy case of self loathing. The only way I could think of getting some love from my people was to date (and hopefully marry) a light skinned guy or Puerto Rican (white guys weren’t really “in” in my neighborhood) and boy, did I love some light skinned men though seldom did they love me back.

I carried this love throughout my 20’s as my own black consciousness evolved (separate from the one I’d inherited from two Afro centric revolutionary parents). It had become second nature so much so that I hardly noticed that I almost always chose light skinned men to adore. When my best friend pointed this fact out to me it became my shame and I felt almost powerless to reverse this often undeserved attraction. Then in earnest I began dating and I dated decent looking and some down right handsome brown and black skinned men, though I did and do still find myself drawn to a few light skinned brothers. I tend to believe it is my inner child still seeking validation from my race.

I read “Leon’s Story” and it was wonderful. I felt that the ancestors were talking through him to me, telling me that I cannot forget the cruelty our people endured to live and survive in this country and… how beautiful we are as a people. Now, when I look at Leon’s smiling photograph I am reminded of myself. He kind of looks like my father at this age smiling in a school photo, except with more innocence. I look at Leon now and see exquisite beauty, hope and joy in his photo and I’m ashamed that it has taken so long for me to find my own. I embrace him as I embrace myself and I know that I will never ever feel ashamed again.

4/2/08, 1:03am