Black beauty and self perception… shadism
Why are these two women in my head line space?
well i was drawn into a worrisome debate over on abagond on black beauty and historically what that has meant. I became really troubled. Black beauty comes in all shapes and forms, i celebrate your beauty if you are fair or dark, but what worries me is that a LOT of black people do not.
For them only one of these beautiful women is truely beautiful. It’s the one on the left, it’s Cassie. She is beautiful that is not what i am trying to raise, the fact that women like Gabrielle are maligned for being dark. why should that be an issue in a worldwide diaspora where the majority of that diaspora are dark skinned, where Cassie and fair skinned persons are a minority .
My arguement is not one that will degrade the beauty of fair skinned women of colour to uphold and glorify the dark skinned beauty, that is just ignorance, and not what i am about. My arguement is why sooo many people in my community hold so dear to a value system that asks them to hate so much of their self identity.
Too much of this arguement is taken up with mud slinging and to help ourseleves we have to stop.Much is said of “fair skinned ,high yellow,redbone,red skin, clear skin…” and too much of “nappy hair,blackie,darkie,….” no wonder we seemed to have regressed from the 1970’s and it’s high ideals of “emancipate yourself from mental slavery” To celebrate the beauty of one does not mean the denial of the other.
Growning up in the 1990’s i knew that the black women were all represented , in my community and in black media, vanessa williams, naomi campbell,nia long,tyra banks,alex wek,Crystal rose,Llwella gideon,Angie Le mar,Oprah winfrey,Aaliyah,lil kim,Faith evans, Mya, Lauren Hill
,en vogue ( had all shades covered),salt’n'pepper,TLC,Kele le roc, the Honeys and my favourites Eternal. By the end of the 1990’s something started to turn and i cannot say honestly i know what that was. After lauren hill had finished her miseducation releases, i noticed slowly that the women of colour in the media was tipping in favour of the lighter skinned woman. I cant say i minded a lot i will support black women and i hope we all support each other regardless of small differences.
All of the female singers that recieved good to execellent Pr in england after 2001 were fair to medium in skin tone, we had ashanti, we had christina millian, we had of course the indestructable machine that is Beyonce knowles, 
we even had her sister solonge knowles. we had tedra moseswe had the rappers trina, we had jackie o. I like most of these artists and they cannot explain this, they have walked into the situation and they are trying to earn a crust, but where did the dark skinned singers go? It could be the record companies fear that someone who is so differnt in phenotype to the consumer that the consumer will be put off? is it the conservative hopes of a record producer who feels thata fair skinned female will have better crossover appeal.
we had Tweet whose first two singles were an absolute treat, and they did well, but then we never heard her songs or follow up singles , we read about them and wondered why they were not on the radio? we had India arie, who ever was doing her publicity ought to be shot…. She should have been on this morning, on evening magazine shows, but apart from “black radio stations” i only saw things about her buried deep in the papers gigs sections 30 pages in. but instead we have the beautiful but almost tuneless Rhianna 
We even had the most popular sexual rapper in this decade Khia, she must have made a mint out of the amount i have heard that song in clubs and out and about, but in England they completely remade the video with 3 or four white models and a fair skinned black woman, completely airbrushing her image out. she’s no oil painting but i feels she has her own dirty charm. she really has the dirtiest face i have ever seen, like she has just done something unmentionable and is about to do so again.
the acting world faired no better, Halle berry was a household name in black household throughout the 1990’s due to her appearance in R kelly videos ( the ones that can be seen legally on music tv not the ones with the underage girls) and her apperance in classic film boomerang. 
she is a biracial woman who self identifies as black, we have loved her sooo long. but after her oscar win, she seemed to be the only black actress cast in anything big budget. ( we love halle , hate the game not the player).Nia long was at the corneras working hard , after love jones and soul food , the big guns in hollywood would not let her in, she has done very well for herself in third watch and boston legal. However gabrielle union has cleaned up doing it big in will smith vehicle “bad boys 2″ and bring it on. But with film there is the added trouble of competition from actresses whose racial identity is seen as less threatening. white actresses or ambigious latina actresses
The gripe in hollywood is “it’s all about money” and if they cast two ethnic leads white people won’t watch and the movie will tank and lose money. FALSE FALSE look at slumdog millionaire…. all entirely south asian, big hit, we empathised with them not because we shared ethnicity but because we cared.
meanwhile where is Aisha taylor?i think she’s great but if you google her for images you will get not only the actress but about 7 or 8 other aisha taylors and fun snaps they posted of themselves, the same thing does not happen to talentless losers like audrina from the hills…. life is annoying tho
so here is a picture of Nia long because she is always cute and all the pic of Aisha were crappy.
So to summerise i think we need to evaulate why certain things are the way they are in our communities, why with the blecahing cream? why is that a viable business? we know it can cause all kinds of medical maladies and we all condemn it use, but we should ask ourselves why people want to use it in the first place, it is not as simple as saying “it’s the desire to tan in reverse” people can use bronzing pearls for that and the last time someone ingested mercury or benzines from that i may have been asleep (it has not happened). Blecahing creams are damging, imagine if white people’s suntan lotions were found to contain carcinogens and mercury, people would be screaming from the roofs, so why aren’t we? Is it a nessecary danger for our women folk? a means to an end?
come on people lets have a serious debate because it really is more than skin deep!!!
when the racist is your family!!!
My cousin is a RACIST!!!!! I capitalised it because that is how grave the situation i am glad to report that she is a second cousin. unforunatley we share mitocondrial dna (mother’s dna we share a great grand mother).
She is the most foul degenrate RACIST, she despises dark skinned black people. Yep that’s what we have, a black woman who despises people in her own family. I found our due to the extrem upset she caused.
Starting at the beginning lets talk about another relative let’s call her scarlett, she is the kindest,strongest woman any person could be. she helped out the RACIST who we shall call copper(because that is the metal that the lowestcurrency is minted in). Copper i assumed was nice enough, had her little family and decided she would set up a business, who helped her out with childcare, Scarlett would never let her pay and looked after her child morning till night when she was studying to do her degree at home. when copper confided that she was upset because she could not secure enough money from the bank who dipped in her pocket because she wanted her family to suceed…..Scarlett.
Scarlett is the powerhouse behind us all. ambitious not only for herself but for her whole family. when copper jeopodised her family and got caught cheating on her distraught husband who held peace talks and convinced her husband to give her another chance…. you guessed it
Anyhoo scarlett was looking through the albums in coppers house, she noticed several family members were missing, including the ones that she had taken with copper’s kids when she had taken away for a weekend at alton towers (theme park). she bluffed but Scarlett was suspicious, she said nothing.
later that week my other cousin was with copper noticed the same thing and asked about it. Turns out copper has been cropping out the dark members from photos and it is not only cosmetic and aesthetic , she admitted that she felt they were disgusting to her physically and mentally not so bright (oh god she said that!!).
Her white husband flew into a rage, he is the sane one in the relationship, he told her that she was mentally unwell and that her admission had changed her in his eyes and he felt uncomfortable being with her. she felt safe enough to admit this because she assumed that my other cousin being mixed race would agree. she did not, she told us all. Scarlett went to pieces, our powerhouse was so devastated, her love and efforts were for someone who thought she was subhuman.
So why should she get a pass on her racism because she is technically black. i cannot understand where she got her mentality but here is the worry, before any of this came out, her husband being socially responsible thought he would give back to the community , by signing up to black adoption agengy.
It is an ethical nightmare, black children in care need homes, but sending them to be raise by copper is like sending them to the kkk. her husband alone … fine. Her NO WAY!If she gets a dark skin child think of the mental damage she will inflict , if the child needs loving disciplin she wont give it, she will assume that the child is just bad and not raise it.
so do i inform the agency that she is a racist who shouldn’t bring up phelm???
What to do???
Apart from feeling ashamed?
Why can’t we all just get along??
April 28, 2009 at 12:29 pm (Africa, Africans, bigotry, black community, black people, britain, colonialism, colorism, colourism, ignorance, media, multicultralism, racism, shadism, the caribbean, the diaspora, the world, west indians) (Africa, black community, black history, black men, black people, Black women, britain, colonialism, culture, hatred, Injustice, literary comment, multicultralism, race, racism, stupidity, The black diaspora, the caribbean, the diaspora, West Indian, west indies)
I was reading the Black Snob the other day and one of her topic just struck me, it was about the diaspora and the tensions and hatred that sometimes bubbles to the surface and the mutual distrust that has grown up.
www.blacksnob.com/snob_blog/2009/4/20/why-cant-we-be-friends-the-diaspora.html
I am of west indian parentage and yes i am proud of my heritage, but that does not mean that i instantly disrespect or look down on any other part of the diaspora.I was born and bred in England in the 1980’s and i grew in a large community of others of similar background, you were either white, black caribbean, asian pakistani or asian indian. that is as diverse as my hometown got. ther was only one african boy at my school and one boy did not dilute the overall caribbean flavor of the black community, we had carnivals and community evenings dances and thus it continued until the late 1990’s when we saw a lot of african immigrants mainly from southern africa and to a lesser extent Nigeria and Ghana.
I couldn’t lie and tell you that there was rioting in the streets. But what we have is many communities co-existing that are mainly separate. The older generations i know generally were told in their youth under the british empire that they were vastly inferior than white men who lived in britain, but even though they wereinferior to white anglo saxons in the mother country (England – what fucked up rhetoric that is !!), they were of course miles better than those other black people who had been cleeved from them in the past. Colonialism worked not only for the advancement of the english language but for some very messed up racial ideals. the kind of racial ideals that asked people to devalue themselves and invest in a racial hierarchy where they were almost always at the bottom, so colonist invented a hierachy where black people could place other black people at the bottom.
My grandmother was amongst some of the more priveilaged black people in her island home, she grew up on a farm that her family owned, her family employed others, she received an education beyond the reach of most of her peers she became a nurse. she recalls a missionary from scotland coming to preach, she was in her nursing station and remembers overhearing this missionary preaching to sick children.
” You must strive to be as good as the pure white children in my parish in london, you must elevate yourselves above your base instincts, above the savagery behind africa,you and your progeny must be above your own origins “
It was 1957. My grandmother did not hear the end of his speech she had to tend to an old man.
She assures me that she was fed a steady diet of such contempt for africa and aficans. her own grandfather was a white irish man who had married a black woman and her mother (my grandmother’s mother) had angered him greatly by having babies with a man with an african mother. the “mullato” classes were socially engineering themselves to be less and less visabily black and those who flouted those convensions were punished harshly. It was the mental and physical distancing of black people in the caribbean from slavery and africa, this was a country where to be black or african in appearance was to be a slave.
It’s understandable, i would not want to be a slave nor mistaken for one. thus began a west indian pathology that saw africaness as something terrible, something to be despised.African coming to the caribbean after the Emancipation in 1838 were speaking african languages, some reminants of those languages survive but that was all. their languages were banned and mocked by the ruling classes as jabber, mumbo jumbo. it was seem in those less pc days as stupidity, any person with a brain could speak english after all…
When my grandmother arrived in England after a journey across the atlantic to spain and a train from southern spain to northern spain and then a ferry to england to meet my grandfather. Her eyes were opened to the lies of her colonial upbringing. England was not the home of christendom ,most of the people there were not even as half as devout as most black people back “home”, she saw licentiousness on a scale she had never seen. She was told that in her homeland that black people were the base and carnal by nature and sexually incontinent. but she came to a land where it was all much worse!
After 3 months she met a fellow medic at work Dr (spelling may be wrong) Ateti from somewhere in West Africa she forgets (bless her she is an old lady after all). They shared many silent lunch breaks. one day they started talking and he confessed that he was surprised that she was not loud, agressive criminal or ignorant as he had grown up believing west indians to be. they had cross words but then realised how they had been bamboozled by colonialisation. they had a good friendship until my Grandfather put a stop to it. He was not having his wife form friendships with any other man. he was less educated he was not coming from a wealthy background and probably held the friendship to be a threat to the marriage based on the stereotypes he had been fed about african men.
The 70’s were a blur of confusion, some parents fed their children the same crap that they themselves had been fed about africa and africans, until Reggae and Rastafarianism took off. The final nail in the colonial bs in my community was alex haley’s roots and the tv series. that and actually meeting real flesh and blood africans, no they did not seem that different! they were not sexually incontinent, nor the vicious villains of the colonialists.
I can only speak from experiance and cannot say what things were like on the african side of the fence. But i can say it was not only a west indian to African line. Starting primary school i was ruthlessly teased and punched( to the point of nosebleeds) by lets call him AA, who joined in the racist bullying by calling me “blackie” i pointed out that he was black too but that was apparently not important since me reasoned “yeah ,but you’re blacker than me!” But i sweep him under the carpet.
I want to talk about my ExBoyfriend who is African his name is Brown, we have a backstory if you want to know more check out my other blog cold nights no romance.
www.noromance.wordpress.com
we dated for 3 years in that time he called me jamaican (i am not jamaican),said things like “you west indians” in a tone i doubt he would tolerate about africans. “you are all the same so why can i not call you jamaican” (it takes 4 hours on a jet to get to jamaica from my island and there is not even a direct flight. he mocked my cultral heritage glibly and refused to acknowledge it until we were screaming at each other and i pulled up something african and used it in the same context. we parted ways on non ethnic basis BTW.
That is how far we have come, we can date but we need to realise that yes we can be proud of our cultral differences without it being a denial of someone elses culture, when i say Anansi stories are integral part of caribbean culture i am not denying it’s ghanian roots what i am saying is that it is as much west indian as african. Anansi had to evolve in the middle passage, we have different stories and different situations. we owe you the chracter, but he is ours too!
i digress, we have to do a lot of soul searching all of us and recognise that we need to emancipate ourselves of colonial blinkers over our eyes.
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