Need to talk about something so I can get it out of my system and do the other stuff I have to do today. I want to discuss how white people think light-skinned-ness works in the Black community.
This was prompted by that blog post by Lela E. Buis on #AmericanDirt. I'm not gonna link it, it's not worth reading and she just wants clicks/attention. I will post the paragraph that summarizes everything wrong with this person's "contribution" to the conversation.
"Since Cummins is judged not-Latina-enough to write about a Mexican Latina character, maybe we should now have another look at who’s publishing as an #OwnVoices minority. For example, should we question Native American writer Stephen Graham Jones...
...who grew up in Texas and has a white name? Or Rebecca Roanhorse, who claims African and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo heritage but writes about Navajo characters? Should we maybe question the light-skinned Nisi Shawl about her qualifications to represent the black experience?"
There's so much to break down here, including how Lela doesn't understand how identity works (because she's never had to think deeply about her own mainstream/privileged identity, I bet). Don't get me started on SGJ having a "white" name. *eyes rolling forever*
But you see the point she's trying to make, yeah? That because Cummins isn't "Latina enough" that it follows that Jones isn't Native enough due to his name, Roanhorse isn't the right kind of Native for what she writes, and Nisi isn't dark enough to represent the Black experience.
Or rather, what she's aiming for is some kind of Swiftian A Modest proposal type of hyperbole to show just how ridiculous people are being! HUFF. Except she doesn't understand the identities she's invoking for her utter nonsense. At all. Not even a little.
I cannot speak as an insider to the first two examples, but I can to the last one: Light skin = Not Black Enough. This is, unfortunately, a favorite notion of white people with unexamined privilege or those who are just straight up racists. And they like to use it to divide us.
b/c they don't understand how racial identity & experience outside the dominant paradigm works, they literally think that the less brown you are the less you identify as a Black person/the less accepted you are as Black. Which is why Lela thought she could get away w/ that line.
And they also think they can use that against us when it suits. Some of you know this, but some of you will be shocked (ppl always are): For years now there's been a conspiracy theory afloat that I'm not actually Black, I'm really white & I photoshop my pictures to be darker.
AFAIK this notion originated from the comments section of Larry Correia's blog and he & other Puppies, Puppy-adjacent folks, and right-wingnuts have perpetuated it amongst themselves for YEARS. They have pictorial evidence! *smh*
I've also seen deep discussion in anon memes about whether me being half white makes me "Black" or not. In case you're wondering: I'm not half white. Why do they think I am? Possibly b/c I'm light, possibly b/c people really want to find reasons to dismiss my activism.
If I'm not Black, or Black enough for real Blackness, then I can't legitimately talk about things that affect Black people with authority. Right? That's how this works, right?
*whispers* Not at all.
*whispers* Not at all.
My Black experience is, was, and always will be different to someone who has much darker skin than I do. Both of our experiences are Black experiences. Neither is any less or more real or valid. Now multiply that by all the shades in-between.
Most white people have no deep understanding of this because for most of them light-skinnedness is only a tool for dividing us (House Negroes vs Field Negroes) or deciding which of us is more "safe" for them to deal with or judging how close we are to whiteness.
I know this is due to how they see this play out in public or in the media. They've watched a Tyler Perry movie and seen his disgusting disdain for light-skinned women (but likely don't notice his equal disdain for anyone darker than him) & think that applies universally.
They see the outcry every time a light-skinned actress (it's almost always an actress) is cast in an iconic Black role and Black folks decry Hollywood's insistence on pushing lighter girls ahead of darker ones even when the story literally doesn't call for it.
What white folks don't see is the very nuanced and complicated discussions going on *inside* the Black community about all these things. For sure, there are issues of colorism that are continuously being hashed out. But that's for US to do AWAY from the white gaze.
And, in many ways, it's work we need to do BECAUSE OF the white gaze. We need to wrestle with these ideas of what is Beautiful, what is Acceptable, what is Attractive, what is Good, and where we get our ideas about these things from? Sometimes the answer is: white culture.
Black people are not the only group struggling with this same issue with the same root cause: white supremacist and imperialist ideas about beauty and worth forced upon us by invaders, colonizers, slave owners, etc.
So for Lela to be out here invoking Nisi's skin tone as a barrier to her being "Black Enough" is her drawing on centuries of white supremacy and oppression and distorted ideas of how identity and race work. It's disgusting and I won't tolerate it.
