Here's something that I saw on one of my favorite new blogs, www.abelleinbrooklyn.com. The post is old...but it hit home with me. So much so I had to repost it and respond on her site.
Here it is:
What Are You?
There is only one other question that I am asked on a regular basis that causes me the same level of frustration (guess what it is. It's not 'Is that your hair?')
I'm never quite sure how to answer just because I think it is so apparently obvious what I am. I have a rather large, nappy 'fro with nappy roots and prominent lips. I think it is stunningly apparent that I am black.
Yes, admittedly I'm pale, but sheesh!After I finish giving the questioner the screw face, if they are still standing there, I look at him (sometimes a her) like they are stupid and I blurt:"I'm Black!"
"Really?"At this point, he wants to know what my ethnicity is."American."
"Yeah. Whatever. But like where are your people from?"
"Oh, you mean the Old Country? Umm… that would be Mississippi."
"Oh." [With great disappointment.]Somewhere along the way it became cool to not be black. Like it's okay to be black if you're a guy, especially if you throw a ball or are in someway affiliated with hip-hop, but to be a girl and "just" be black? That's at least a two point deduction from the dime-scale these days.I think there was a time when the majority of black men's ideal woman was a black girl. Not necessarily a Black + other girl, but "just" a black girl with nappy or permed hair that didn't flow down her back. The type of girl that wears a scarf at night and a shower cap in the morning. Brown eyes with contacts for vision, not color. No "exotic" features like so-called "chinky-eyes." But that doesn't seem to be the standard anymore. Black + X, or hell, just X seems to be the preference these days. I don't know what to blame. Is it hip-hop (when was the last time you saw more than one "just" black girl—unless she has a gigantic ass-- in a video)? The American media pushing an unrealistic standard of beauty that black men have embraced? White women buying asses? Whatever it is, it's a sorry state of community affairs when the black man's queen has to be other + black to be considered a dime, or just beautiful even.
I'm done. Going to look for "Something New."
MY RESPONSE:
So, I just wanted to start by saying that I am new to your blog and I absolutely love it so I went back and started reading from the beginning.
DISCLAIMER:This might not make any sense at all and if it doesn't it's just mark it off as ramblings of a 20 yr old. If it does, thanks for the read.
Okay on to my actual point of responding to this:I am a 20 yr old junior in college and I am finding this to be a truth more and more as I go along in school and life. BUT to be quite frank it's not completely men's fault for their love for an "exotic" woman. It's women! I find that a lot of my friends say s*** like I'm a red-bone and pride themselves on being a lighter complexion. It's amazing to me because even though I live in North Carolina and even though I go to a predominately white school I thought we were past this shit! PAST IT.... Recently, I was at a house party and a young man told my friends and I that because he was so intoxicated and because our names were "hard" (the only one with an even remotely hard name is mine and if you sound that shit out it isn't that hard to remember..but I digress) he would just refer to us as "The Home Girl Squad". At first I wasnt offended by this but I've had this nagging feeling for about 3 years that I couldn't figure out why I get so angry and it finally hit me. Most of my friends are lighter than me and they KNOW it. Im often referred to (by them) as DC (dark chocolate) when Im actually no where near it. This same set of friends refer to themselves as the "brown-girl squad" and have spoken more racist remarks towards their own race that if a white person said it Jesse and Al would be on line 1 in a hot second. Ive noticed that as young women we put each other down so often that it's become a norm. Somewhere along the way a few of us have slipped through the cracks of onward thinking and among us women the paper bag test came back with full force.
-N
