Colorism Wars

Here we go again....
Cherished readers, I closed the year 2010 with a pre-holiday hiatus blog post entitled For Mixed Girls, For Black Girls. I wrote it as a call to "lighted skinned" and "dark skinned" women in the black and mixed-black community to confront our pain and our struggles and ultimately come to a place of healing, love and understanding. No sooner do we hit the  new year, however, does a club in Columbus, Ohio start planning a "Dark Skinned vs. Light Skinned Party" (Exhibit A to our right).  Club promoters apparently thought it would be cute to use the Twitter hashtags #teamlightskin and #teamdarkskin as inspiration for their party, which has subsequently caused a Twitter frenzy and blogosphere sound-off (see Clutch Magazine's article on the party) over the past few weeks...

To add fuel to the already volatile colorism battle that ensued in cyperspace, our very own mixed race entrepreneurs of Mixed Chicks hair products-- a brand that makes products for naturally curly/kinky hair (and which I've been using religiously until well, now) allegedly tweeted 
"#teamlightskin sure hope all will try @Mixedchicks to care 4 those curls.” The company has stated that it sent messages to all teams, not just #teamlightskin. (check out Black Girl With Long Hair's article on this subject. In addition, Sakita Holley's blog discusses the brand's PR epic fail that caused huge fallout in this article ).

But I guess for me that's neither here nor there. The damage, despite whatever good, clean intentions has been done. The Mixedchicks tweeter was a bit unsympathetic if not wholly ahistorical in their follow-up responses to the Twitter debate. The Mixedchicks tweeter seemed to think that we've moved beyond our issues with colorism stating "we didn't realize there was "a war" still. thought everyone celebrated difference like that. again, we apologize." Look, I as much as the next one would like to fantasize about how we can fix the world's ills one natural curly/kinky head and magic hair potion at a time. Yet for some communities, particularly those with people of African descent, hair is political and skin color is political. It's kind of a fact of life at this point. Things have been deeply internalized through systems and institutions of power and oppression that predate you and I, but somehow still effect our day to day. Yeah, it sounds all doom and gloom. And in these our postracial climes, it's not sexy and cute to talk about it. "Let's Confront Colorism" doesn't make quite as hot a party flier. That, however, doesn't make it a non-issue. In many ways colorism and its tons of baggage is a very intra-community issue affecting Latin@, Asian, indigenous and mixed communities alike both here at home and abroad.

There's nothing that gets to me more than colorism within communities of color and the minute I feel like we're taking one step forward, we take a hundred steps back.

Yet, what does it mean for us to move forward? Thoughts?

(Check out BGLH guest blogger "Makiya's" article " A bi-racial woman’s response to the Mixed Chicks Twitter debate

For Mixed Girls, For Black Girls...

Fiona, Jo Burg, complex of mixed girls/
For surviving through every lie they put into us now/The world is yours and I swear I will stand focused/Black girls, raise up your hands; the world should clap for us...  Jean Grae from Talib Kweli's Black Girl Pain

I recently googled "mixed-race women." Among the first things that pop-up after the photos of Halle Berry, Thandie Newton and Alicia Keys were the following results: 1) Dating mixed race women Free Dating, Singles and Personals 2) Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out: Amazon.ca  (a recent addition!) 3)Mixed race women are put in place of black beauty and 4)Why are mixed race women usually associated with beauty and black women are not? followed by a few other pages full of dating and personal ads as well as forum threads about "beautiful" or "hot" mixed-race women and models.

To the arguable extent that Google can be a viable indicator of any popular thought, it does show that at least in cyber-space most of what's out there about mixed-race women fixates on our physique and our bodies particularly in relation to "monoracial" black women. As a mixed-race, black woman myself, I've struggled to break down the stereotypes in my own communities that often favor "light-skinned,"red-boned" women with pelo bueno (good hair) while painfully pitting mixed beauty against black beauty. These conceptions beg the question:
Is mixed beauty inevitably 'anti-black' beauty?

Growing up, the contested terrain of mixed/black beauty was played out most profoundly in the politics of hair. My hair was often the only thing that belied any mixed heritage and at different points in my life I felt like Zora Howard in her Biracial Hair poem: Some days, I'd stare in the mirror convinced I looked just like Alicia Keys or I'd frantically tease it out in repeatedly failed attempts to rock the perfectly epic Angela Davis 'fro trying desperately to fit into iconic neo-soul black beauty, only to be left looking like a vague, frizzy-haired, busted teen version of Diana Ross.

There's a common misconception that mixed black women have it all. After all, the media seems to favor us or at least light-skinned women that look like us, from Hollywood to our very own black entertainment industry (if it indeed, is "ours"). Colorism is nothing new. It's a painful and persistent inheritance of internalized racism and self-hatred-- the eternal struggle between the "Wanabees" and the "Jigaboos" comically immortalized in Spike Lee's acclaimed satirical film School Daze. Are we either "high yella heifas" or "tar-babies"?... Wanabees, or Jigaboos...

But sisters, whether you're 'dark or you're fair' we've all been damaged. We've all been used and exploited. Our bodies, the violent battleground of inequality--and to add insult to injury we just keep driving that imagined chasm between us deeper and deeper. Light-skinned privilege is real. More "European" features are generally favored--true story. But black folk come in different shades, sizes and hair textures that make visible just how mixed our history as a people has been. Yet our beauty is irrevocably constructed in relation to whiteness and widespread healing from the collective trauma of oppression inflicted and then self-inflicted (most notably, through damaging products like lye-relaxer and bleaching cream) has only just begun. And mixed girls have not been immune. For first generation mixed women of African descent learning to love our blackness and our mixedness is a long process if we ever even get there. And I am, ultimately, left with too many hard questions...

Mixed-black sisters out there: how many times have we considered the privilege we embody? How do we resist the use of our bodies by media, or even by our own families to further marginalize black beauty and objectify ourselves? Will we always be seen as "Wannabees?" Must our bodies always be seen as somehow "anti-black"? Can we love the kinks, the curls, the dark, the light and everything in between? Is mixed pride inherently anti-black pride?

Mixed girls, black girls and mixed-black girls, can we (re)imagine a beauty where we can all be celebrated as the queens we are or will we continue to play into the hands of exclusive standards of beauty? In the words of Ntozake Shange, will we ever find ourselves at the end of our rainbows and will we learn to love each other fiercely?

I desperately hope so.

Consuming the Melting Pot

Thomas C. Holt a historian at University of Chicago and author of The Problem of Race in the 21st Century identifies “a shift in the terrain of racism”-- “Could it be” he asks, “that the issue now is less the utter ignorance of other cultures, as in times past, but too great a surface familiarity; less stereotypes of the other than the voracious consumption of its metonymic parts?”

Case in point, Mr. Holt: Last summer's hottest hipster accessory of choice---the Native American headdress. Now granted, hipsters by definition are compulsive Cultural Appropriators with often deceptively deep pockets. They consume bits and pieces of popular, alternative, sub- and foreign cultures to achieve their allegedly socially conscious "bohemian chic." It's just a simple fact and I'm cool with that. But the hipsters got me thinking about consumption and advertising. What's been most worrying to me is the wholly dehistoricized, apolitical nature of consumption these days-- the ways in which this consumption assumes that dangerous "familiarity" that Holt describes and brings us right into the thick of issues of objectification, commodification and ultimately, what I see as racial, economic and social (in)justice issues. I see it everywhere from the hipster headdress right down to gentrification in places like Brooklyn and Harlem... a dangerous familiarity...  and one that apparently, can be purchased.

So in the beginning(ish) there was Eve....

Back in 1993, TIME Magazine came out with a Special Issue featuring the ironically named “Eve”-- a computer generated image of a woman  who was presented as the “New Face of America.” The caption on the front cover read: “Take a good look at this woman. She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of" ..... dundunDUN “The New Face of America: How Immigrants are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.”

Ultimately, Eve is what comes out of the melting pot. Eve is produced by technology, she's also explicitly gendered as female. There’s even an article in the issue that talks about how all the male computer programmers who created her, ended up falling in love with her. Eve becomes this object of desire and we are asked very explicitly on this front cover to look at her, exercise our scopophilia- our love, our desire to look and visually consume.

While this isn’t an advertisement per se, Eve represents WHAT and WHO marketers and advertisers are now both selling and marketing to. I see two things at work when we look at multiraciality and the market. The first is this idea that came out of the 1990s, that multiraciality as multiculturalism whether through it's colorful glossy print ads of black, brown and white people singing, dancing or walking around in their pajamas or through the physically mixed bodies of multiracial individuals or even via entirely constructed computer-generated images that we can attain and quite literally buy into a racial paradise. These images are inextricable tied up in ideas of the “future” of what Americans--- as in American “bodies” will look like in the years and decades to come.

The second is the ways in which race functions as a “technology” by hiding the ways in which we all have a relationship to the law and state power, yet this tenuous and violent relationship (often enacted on racialized and gendered bodies within the state) particularly in self-proclaimed progressive or liberal environments is covered up by ideas of fairness, equality, protection and inclusion and advertisers are feeding into this in a big way. There’s no denying that the state and the market are inextricably linked and that the market plays a huge political role in defining the state’s subjects and citizens. 

The cruel irony is that given proposed racist policies like Arizona's SB 1070, what would happen if Eve went to the southern border today? In today's racial climate, would Eve continue to be celebrated as the "face of America" or would she be sent packing "back to her country"?......

I'm really interested in the construction and use of the mixed body in contemporary advertising and it’s racialized and gendered implications particularly in relation to the state and national identity. In different manifestations advertisements have framed multiraciality and multriacials as commodity, product and at times even fetish-- something to be consumed, acquired and possessed. In the past decade there has also been a transition in the mixed-body from being mere product to now also being a visible and viable consumer and subject (see Kimberly McClain Dacosta's Making Multiracials  in which she discusses the politics of recognition that happen in the market and the ways in which that recognition can quite literally create a racial identity.)
I'll leave you with a few images from the European clothing company United Colors of Bennetton (whose ads were pretty controversial in the 90s), the Telefonica phone company, American Apparel, Levi's jeans, photos from the "Biracial photoshoot" on America's Next Top Model that was critiqued for putting models in "brown face" and a photo from a 2008 Allure spread entitled "Faces of the Future" in which multiracial models were used to mark an imagined "future."  

 

These Telefonica images are pretty creepy. To give you some context, these are computer generated images that state from left to right "The lowest rate calls from Japan to Scotland, from Turkey to Sweden and from Senegal to Germany." It's also interetsing to compare these creepy male-bodied computer generated images with TIME's  sexy female-bodied "Eve." Curious, curiouser...

 

This Levi's ad marks a particular moment in U.S. advertising in the 90s in which marketers were selling to a much younger, hipper demographic. This demographic was being told through images like this one that in the famous words of MJ, it doesn't matter if you're black or white, as long as you had these jeans, you were free and you could buy into a racial utopia.

Native Speaker: Essay in "Other Tongues" Anthology

You can read the full text here

"Skin" Trailer

Here is the 2009 documentary film trailer for "Skin Deep: The Sandra Laing Story".

Below is the trailer for SKIN the feature film starring Sophie Okonedo.
Should be fascinating....
U.S. DVD will be released in February 2011.

 

Thanks Caitlin!

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out!

NEW from Inanna Publications:

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out

edited by Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson

"Speaks boldly and poignantly to who we are, and by 'we' I mean … all citizens of 21st century North America."

INANNA PUBLICATIONS and the TORONTO WOMEN'S BOOKSTORE

invite you to the launch of

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out

on Thursday, December 9, 2010 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm

Toronto Women's Bookstore, 73 Harbord Street, Toronto (at Spadina)

Refreshments will be served. 

Authors will read from the book at 7:15 p.m.

OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT is an anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. 

Praise for 

OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT

In a fresh approach to the quest for understanding mixed-race identity in the Americas, the multiple genres that find their way into the Other Tongues anthology -- from poetry to photography, fiction to scholarship -- perfectly mirror the prodigious spectrum of their authors’ positions toward the topic. This collection speaks boldly and poignantly to who we are, and by "we" I mean not only women of mixed-race ancestry, but all citizens of 21st-century North America.

-- Lise Funderburg, author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity

These exciting, beautifully inked narratives tell us that, as each woman embraces her biracial or multiracial identity, she mothers a new world, one with equal space for everyone.

-- George Elliott Clarke, Africadian & Eastern Woodland Metis, Laureate, 2001 Governor-General’s Award for Poetry

Passionate, courageous and insightful, Other Tongues speaks affectingly about the pleasures and paradoxes of living between the conventional categories of race. It is a significant anthology, one that I've been waiting for.

-- Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor,

Black Canadian Literature and Diaspora Studies, 

University of Toronto

About the editors:

Adebe De Rango-Adem recently completed a research writing fellowship at the Applied Research Center in New York. Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world’s largest prize for writers under thirty.

Andrea Thompson’s spoken word CD, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award in 2005. A pioneer of slam poetry in Canada, Thompson has also hosted Heart of a Poet on Bravo TV, CiTr Radio’s spoken word show, Hearsay.

The publisher acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council 

for our publishing program.

INANNA PUBLICATIONS

www.yorku.ca/inanna

Re-Cap of The 1st Annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

Yup. It. Was. Amazing.
Over 400 participants from all over the country gathered at Depaul Unverisity in Chicago, IL for the First Annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference. There were panels, round tables, film screenings and keynote addresses ranging from the arts to new media, from high education to health care and from psychology to politics.
I presented on and chaired the Panel entitled "High-Ed Challenges for Mixed Race Students" with Brett Coleman (grad student in the Community and Prevention Research doctoral program of the Psychology Department at University of Illinois at Chicago), Kenyatta Dawson (grad student in the Education doctoral program at Texas State University) and Dr. Jessica Guzman Rea (current Academic Advisor for the Honors College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County).We discussed challenges faced by multiracial students in higher-ed and the ways in which different systems and structures could be changed to better support identity development and socialization for these students.

In addition to sharing some of my work, I also had the opportunity to check out a round table of Wesley and and University of Washington students who are currently teaching and co-facilitating the only student-run courses on multi experiences called Mixed 101. I also attended a panel of students from Berkeley's Ethnic Studies doctoral program discussing mixed identity as well as a panel on entitled "Back From Beyond Black: Alternative Paradigms for Critical Mixed Race Theory" with Michele Elam, Rainier Spencer, Habiba Ibrahim and Jared Sexton. 

It's taken me a few weeks to process it all, but the wheels are still turning  and my excitement about future dialogue and action hasn't worn off.  Throughout the conference I kept wishing I coul dbe at every single event. But alas, I was forced to choose. So, please checkout co-founder Laura Kina's blog post Watershed Moment for Critical Mixed Race Studies for an in depth profile of all the weekend's events. In addition take some time a take a look at videos from the conference. Here is a link to the following videos of the conference. You must have iTunes installed in order to view the video.  It can be download here.

• November 5th (00:19:48): Welcoming Remarks by DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and conference organizers Camilla Fojas, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Laura Kina.
• November 5th (00:50:36): Keynote Address by Andrew Jolivette, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation”
• November 6th(01:00:04): Keynote Address by Mary Beltrán, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”
• November 6th (00:57:08): Keynote Address by Louie Gong, “Halfs and Have Nots”