Maybe this helps to explain why I so thoroughly detest the phrase "on the down low"

It is a myth. There is no secret cult of Black men spreading AIDS among the community intentionally because they operate publicly as straight and have loads of random unprotected sex. 

I find it interesting that when talking about non-Black gay men who promote themselves as straight, the language is much more sympathetic. They are ‘in the closet’, ‘closeted’, and it is understood that this is because their lives and livelihoods might be at risk. 

But when talking about Black men, they are villainous, dishonest, spreading fatal diseases while searching for yet another sexual conquest. And this is a secret club of them doing this with hand signs and secret meeting rooms. 

The hypocrisy kills me.

--daughterofassata

(via Choosing Pancakes) 

"In the White racist imagination, “a nigger is a nigger is a nigger.” White supremacy took different types of Africans and reduced them to “the nigger.” I’m not chasing that kind of thinking. We are diverse!  I refuse to embrace that sameness. I know my people are diverse. Black rigidity, and not Black diversity, is the real threat to Black people. When we buy into notions of Black sameness, we begin to lose. I don’t want, nor do I need, all Black people to be the same. Some of us are straight, some are gay, some are masculine, some are feminine, some of us are rich, some of us are poor, some of us are college educated, some of us are trade educated, some of us outspoken, some of us are quiet. Respect our diversity. How can you claim to love Blackness, want to fight for it, when you see us the same way White supremacist do? We are not a pool of sameness."

--antiintellect

I'm finally reading Toure's "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness"

partially for pleasure and partially for a paper I'm writing about Awkward Black Girl, because let's be real, I don't have time to read for pleasure until April 14th.

And I'm following him on Twitter and have to fight myself hard not to tweet everything I find profound and tag him in every single tweet. I'm considering it an exercise in self-control.

But I have to share this, his writings on another Black student telling him he wasn't Black:

"Why was I working to reject being defined by the white gaze but not also working to reject definition by the Black gaze?...Who gave him the right to determine what is and is not Blackness for me? Who made him the judge of Blackness? To say I'm not Black is to accuse me of apostasy as if Blackness were a religion that could be escaped. But we cannot abandon Blackness even if we commit treason against it. It's permanent. Even an Uncle Tom must suffer beneath the boot of white supremacy. And I'm not a Tom just because you don't understand me. I may be a work in progress but I will always be Black. The only things in life that I am obligated to do are pay taxes, be Black, and die." 

--Toure, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now, pg. 97

SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME WHY

Tyler Perry is getting his own television station. WHO THINKS THIS IS A GOOD IDEA?! WHO?!?! I would like to know so I can go personally slap them, on behalf of advocates of social change everywhere. Because tell me, please, I beg you, tell me one good thing Tyler Perry has done for a Black person anywhere (his-worth-$350-million-self not included)?

Some of you are going to say he's funny. Some of you are going to say he's funny because he exaggerates the truth. Some of you are going to say he's funny because he tells the truth. I say he tells stories that he wants y'all to think are funny because y'all think they're true. Because okay, sure, I'm sure people like pistol-in-one-hand-Bible-in-the-other Madea exist out there in the world somewhere. I know that there are cracked out mothers and histories of abuse and family members who will tell you to sit there and take it. I have experienced black churches like the ones he depicts. Scenes that have taken place in the living room on House of Payne have taken place in real people's living rooms, I know. I KNOW.

But what I know more than any of those things is that there are MILLIONS of Black peoples who are nothing like this, and I am SICK AND FUCKING TIRED of this same monolithic image of the Black community being shoved down our throats and the community responding by placing the shover on a pedestal! He's like the new millenium's version of shucking and jiving, and I'll be damned if I sit back while we let him portray this slice of Blackness as THE truth rather than A truth. I'm going to try to list all the vicious stereotypes that I think he's perpetrating and, even worse, getting Black folks to identify with and internalize.

1. The class war between African-Americans is real, and middle/upper-class Blacks should be demonized. 
2. Relatedly, all middle/upper-class Black women should realize that men of their own social/educational status aren't "real men", and should fall in love with/marry blue-collar men.
3. A Black woman cannot be strong without being angry/violent. 
4. Relatedly, Black women are consistently in trouble with the law. 
5. Light-skinned Black women represent all that is good and right with the world, and dark-skinned Black women are inherently problematic. 
6. Dark-skinned Black women are inherently unattractive and sexually undesirable.
7. Thin, White, blonde womanhood is the ideal standard of beauty/femininity/desirability that all women must imagine themselves as exemplifying to have any sort of self-respect.
8. Womanhood is a role that can be appropriated, belittled, and dramatically over-emphasized by men for the enjoyment of the masses.
9. There is no such thing as a traditional family amongst Black peoples.
10. African-Americans who are not practicing Christians should be ostracized.
11. Known history of a criminal past or past dependence on drug abuse should have zero effect on whether you choose to let someone [back] into your or your children's lives.
12. Dark-skinned Black men are liars, while light-skinned Black men are saviors. 
13. Gay Black men are "on the down low," having unprotected sex, and spreading HIV to Black females.
14. Physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse are normal, standard elements of life as a Black woman. 
15. Black men are the greatest threat to Black women's health/lives, but also our only possible saviors.
16. Black peoples should leave all their problems to divine intervention.

That's what I came up with off the top of my head. I could probably keep going, but I have more posts to write. 

I will admit that there is most likely a grain of truth to each of these statements, but only in so far as you add "some" to every mention of Black peoples or any subset of Black peoples, and that you recognize that those same such "some _____" statements can be filled in by members of ANY SOCIAL GROUP IMAGINABLE. But no. We are presented with these ideas solely in terms of Blackness, and very specific "types" of Blackness at that, types which are marketed as being the end-all-be-alls of Blackness. There is no counter-narrative here. Awkward Black Girl ain't got a TV show. 

So let's go back to the question, what good has come out of this for Black peoples? Maybe a few more Black women got tested for HIV. Maybe someone somewhere got the courage to leave her abusive relationship. Those are good things, yes, but do they have to come at the expense of demonizing and even-further-marginalizing subsets of an already marginalized people, widening gaps and strengthening tensions that already existed within the Black community, and silencing the voices of other sections of Blackness? I think not. Are any of the SIXTEEN DAMAGING IDEAS I just listed doing any good for anybody? I think not. IS. HE. FUNNY? I think not. I think he one of the most problematic Black men in the country, and at a time when I was just bemoaning the death of the Black sitcom/Black family show...this is THE OPPOSITE of what we need. I am thoroughly unconvinced any good will come from this endeavor. Someone stop the madness, please! 

Black and Different Unite!

So y'all know that my blackness relationship to the dominant cultural narrative about what blackness is is something I struggle with. And while the Black Princetonian community definitely makes me feel less jarringly out of place than do/did most of the other interactions I've ever had with peoples of African descent--let it be known that I LOVE my fellow Black Princetonians, even when I don't feel like I mesh well with the group--I've never really totally been able to shake that puzzle-piece-that-got-wet-and-now-just-won't-fit-no-matter-how-hard-you-try feeling. (Something along the lines of I can stand strong with the group in a discussion forum like a BSU or PABW meeting, but Idgaf how popular the dance is, I will never portray any part of my body as "stanky". I can seek/give advice to fellow naturalistas on campus, but I don't believe in God. I feel like parts of me are both the thesis and the antithesis of the norms of our community, and so I've come to a happy medium with one foot in and one foot out.) So after getting internally frustrated trying to totally Black-ify my life for two years, I joined an eating club and Sustained Dialogue and have finally started to have the rainbow coalition of friends I'd always wanted. Again, nothing new here--I've talked about this before. 

What I really really love discovering, though, as I brought up yesterday in my post about Awkward Black Girl, is that out there in the interwebz world exist lots of other people who feel just as torn between their true selves and what the world wants their "Black" selves to be, people who want to change the narrative, people who get the vibe from other people, both Black and non-Black, that their racial validity is being questioned. Part of me wants to call this the rise of those who get called "Oreo," but I'm positive it's broader than that. [Side note: it wasn't until Sustained Dialogue this year that I heard the terms Banana and Apple (see definition six). Blew my mind. Also part of the reason I really don't want to limit my thesis about racial identity on campus to Black students--there are all kinds of tensions and derogatory in-group names I was entirely unaware of.] Some call us "awkward". Some call us "nerds". Some call us "bougie". Maybe we're all of those things. Maybe we're none. What we definitely are, though, is Black. And here, in large numbers. 

These two articles on the subject made me smile today:

Excerpt One (though I don't support other Black Americans trying to threaten my race card either--if anyone should recognize a broader interpretation of Blackness, it's us): 

"It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how "down" I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me, as a Black woman? Unacceptable."  -- Issa Rae (aka AWKWARD BLACK GIRL HERSELF), from The Huffington Post

Excerpt Two:

"My experience of surprising White folks has continued my whole life....the near-hostility from non-nerdy Black folks has been the most painful....So, I have tried to be Black in stereotypically recognizable ways....American people of all races have a hard time acknowledging the complicated ways that blackness exists...Some of us just want to be free to be our complicated Black selves and kick it however the wind blows." -- PhyllisRemastered

Another thing that made me smile: a black staff member here at Lewis, who I met at a Fields Center event and is leaving Princeton for Northwestern, called me "Sista" when he was saying his goodbyes. I love getting called Sista. Makes me feel like the person addressing me recognizes that I fit despite all the ways in which I am not normative.

Color Consciousness

So I go off on racism a lot...I'm gonna switch things up a little bit and talk about colorism amongst peoples of the African diaspora in the United States, though it should be noted that it's a worldwide problem affecting peoples of many different races.

Wikipedia says: "Colorism is prejudice or discrimination in which human beings are accorded differing social treatment based on skin color...The term colorism refers to when lighter skin tones are preferred and darker skin is considered less desirable or darker skin tones are preferred and lighter skin is considered less desirable."

Urbandictionary is more limited and more blunt: The discrimination of African Americans by Skin tone in their own community, usually subconsciously done, as most Blacks dont realize they're doing it until some dumb rapper or famous person makes a stupid untrue statement about darker toned women. Perpetuated during slavery and by the media which seems to suggest lighter skin females to be of a higher stance than darker ones. Perpetuated by rappers who often show more lighter skinned women in videos and hardly any darker ones. Perpetuated by some Black men who treat lighter skinned females in a higher regard than darker toned ones. An untrue Inplication that darker skin girls cannot be as fine as lighter ones. Bullshit.

A confession: like many things, colorism isn't something I really had a good idea of until coming to Princeton. Blame it on never having really had close black friends [with one notable though short-lived exception] growing up. Well, rephrase: I had a distorted understanding of colorism. Let's go through notable color-related memories/experiences; they all have to do with my family, because let's face it, they're the only black people I ever really interacted with. 
1) If my father was a woman, soooo many things would make more sense he would be called a redbone. Light Bright. [Sn: Evidently these terms are androgynous. I've never heard them used to describe men before. That touches on an issue too big for this side note...] I remember when I was a little kid, I legitimately thought he was White. My mom noticed that I colored him with the "apricot" Crayola crayon as opposed to the brown I used for the rest of us, and called me out on it when I was a little kid, which led to my first discussion about the fact that Black people come in all different shades of beautiful. [I'm sure that's not what she actually said, but let's go with it.]
2) Starting in middle school I began to get the "Are you mixed? What are you mixed with?" questions left and right, and people never seemed to believe that I was just black. [Well, okay, we've been there already. I am an eclectic mixture of backgrounds that combines into Blackness.] 
3) My mother avoids the sunlight like she is a vampire. She hates going to the beach, and always has an umbrella and some ridiculous hot whenever my grandmother would drag us to Atlantic City's historically black "Chickenbone Beach" (I kid you not) while I was growing up. It wasn't until the beginning of high school that I finally asked her about this bizarre habit, and she said very nonchalantly that she was trying not to get any darker. 
4) Fast-forward to the summer after freshman year of college, when my friends made me realize that I do, in fact, love the beach when it does not involve other members of my family. I would come home from a day full of sun, sand, and surf with a tan (I tan easily) and the first thing any member of my family would say upon my return is "Daaaaaang you got dark!" If that family member was my sister, she would probably make some joke about how we should take a picture before I lose my tan, I "actually look like I belong in this family." Which meant that within the course of my daily life, I looked like an outsider.
Now let's go beyond my family to the Orange Bubble. My freshman year roommate was pretty color-conscious, and whenever we would talk about things like makeup or fashion choices, she would bring up the I could/she couldn't wear this thing or that thing because I'm light-skinned/she's dark-skinned. When I went natural, a lot of conversations with black women of various hues about how my texture varied from theirs, with either implications or direct statements about the amount of White/African/etc. in our heritage. Somewhere along the way I began eschewing the term "light-skinned" and calling myself "caramel" colored, a term I'd first heard in a hip-hop song in elementary/middle school but had never thought of as applying to myself before, an example of the common practice of fetishizing black people skin colors (as came to light recently in the Naomi Campbell Cadberry chocolate ad scandal). Skin color came up as a groan-inducing topic in meetings of various Black cultural organizations and was a featured tough-topic in student-written plays. When I changed my profile picture to one of my Ghanaian-American ex-boyfriend and I, my best friend of 7 years commented not on how cute we were, but that in all that time, he'd "never noticed how light-skinned" I really am. My friend of 14 years liked that comment, as if she agreed. And I couldn't even get mad, because I couldn't deny that holding his hand made me feel like the lightest-skinned person in the world. Little by little, I started to recognize that it was kind of a big deal. 
But it's still kind of hard for me to wrap my head around all of this. When I hear about Twitter battles between #teamlightskin and #teamdarkskin I don't know where I fall--well, okay, I fall on #teamantidiscrimination, but you know what I mean. Do I "pass" the brown paper bag test? It depends on what season you're testing me during. I tan as actively as any white person during the summer. Back when I used to wear powder on my face, I had a winter shade and a summer shade. But beyond any of that, THIS IS SO FUCKING POINTLESS. I have two words to say here, INTERNALIZED RACISM. That's all colorism is. Like the belief that straight hair is any better than nappy/kinky/curly hair or the desire to walk a little faster when there's a lone black man behind you on the sidewalk at night, any belief about the shade of one's skin implying something about their character or inherent value is damn foolish and racist as hell. 
If I hear one more sister talking about how she has to marry a light-skinned brother (or a White man) so her kids won't bear the stigma of being dark skinned, I am going to SMACK THE SHIT OUT OF HER and say hey, why don't we work on changing the societal norms that say your skin color isn't beautiful? Rihanna is the woman with the most fans on Facebook right now. People are calling this a victory for black women everywhere! ...Oh but she's light-skinned. Of course. Womp womp. Or everything about how Michelle Obama changed the way dark-skinned Black women are seen in popular culture, and the people who have the nerve to say they respect Barack more because he married a dark-skinned woman? NEGROES PLEASE. I can't even. Why can't both of these women's achievements be recognized as victories for black women everywhere, regardless of their complexion? I don't think Dr. King knew imagined had to be talking to his own brothers and sisters when he dreamed that his four little children would grow up in a world where they would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Whatever shade of brown my skin is, whatever delicious food item I want to relate it to, at the end of the day, I am just a Black woman, like all the rest of you. These divisions are pointless and downright counterproductive...and those are the hardest kind to get rid of. Le sigh.

Do you know what I see here? 3 different shades of gorgeous. The end.