Yesterday, on NPR, I heard a black college student claim that she and her fellow African Americans are not allowed to "take pride" in being black anymore. She claimed that she and her piers are labeled racists if they express pride in the color of their skin and the cultural heritage that goes along with it.
I beg to differ.
In my experience, it is white Euro-Americans like me who cannot express pride in the color of their skin. I have many times, both in person and in the media, seen black individuals praised for expressing pride in their "blackness." But I have never once seen a white person lauded for taking pride in her "whiteness." In fact, I believe that I would be taken to task much more harshly for expressing pride in being a white man than an African American expressing pride in being black.
If I could talk to the woman who made that comment on NPR, I would ask her to specify exactly how she has been "disallowed" to take pride in her black skin. I really am curious. I think there is a fundamental difference between her and me. It is a difference undoubtedly based in any number of cultural differences and social experiences. She wants to be not just allowed to take pride in her skin color, but to be praised for taking pride in it. On the other hand, it has never really occurred to me before to take pride in my skin color.
I think she's just as racist as I am.
I beg to differ.
In my experience, it is white Euro-Americans like me who cannot express pride in the color of their skin. I have many times, both in person and in the media, seen black individuals praised for expressing pride in their "blackness." But I have never once seen a white person lauded for taking pride in her "whiteness." In fact, I believe that I would be taken to task much more harshly for expressing pride in being a white man than an African American expressing pride in being black.
If I could talk to the woman who made that comment on NPR, I would ask her to specify exactly how she has been "disallowed" to take pride in her black skin. I really am curious. I think there is a fundamental difference between her and me. It is a difference undoubtedly based in any number of cultural differences and social experiences. She wants to be not just allowed to take pride in her skin color, but to be praised for taking pride in it. On the other hand, it has never really occurred to me before to take pride in my skin color.
I think she's just as racist as I am.
1 comment:
Hm. (Hi, Ben.) I'm taking a seminar in Toni Morrison and working on a conference paper about Langston Hughes's representations of black womanhood around 1920, so your post resonates with a lot of what I'm reading now.
I think one side of the argument is that throughout the whole of Western history people have been lauding whiteness, you know, frequently in really subtle ways (like coding bad things dark and good things light, etc.). In this view, then, not only is there a lot of embedded color prejudice to overcome (much of it symbolic), but also there's a need to almost over-emphasize the beauty and value of "blackness."
This is sort of apparent in what some critics call the "last taboo" in African American culture, which is valuing based on gradations of skin color (dark men pursuing very light women, for instance, or families being proud of their "yellow" rather than brown or black skin). I've read recently about black self-hatred being really subtle and really linked to color (which itself is linked to culture in complicated ways). So there's another argument for emphasizing pride in darkness.
That said, I don't think we're doing a really good job as a culture to really engage the topic and find balance of beauty in all skin colors, etc. And I also think it's wonderful that you're willing to be honest about frustration over this instead of keeping quiet. Half the time I'm too much of a pansy to voice questions or opinions that aren't quite politically correct or don't fit in with my recently discovered liberal guilt (which snuggles up pretty nicely with my deep-seated fundamentalist guilt). So bravo.
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