Would it help if I admitted up front that this is me tooling around on my personal blog trying to think things through about this blog post that got me all amped up yesterday.
My first response was straight up, WTF, did they really just trivialize someone's experience under the guise of rendering a critique somewhat rooted in nebulosity (what a word!). Nebulous because there wasn't a working definition of what light-skinned and brown-skinned really referred to beyond BeYahweh Knowles and Halle "the nose knows" Berry. Also, it would have be helpful I think to hVE pictures featuring the skin tone of all now in the convo (you know, so everyone can see who is repping for what skin tone since skin tone can be quite relative depending on who/whom one is posting about and to).***
I freely admit that I shut down to hearing or accepting whatever real critique or pain the blog desired to convey! I have refrained from commenting on the site because I don't think the way I feel now would add anything to the discussion over there. But here on my sometime-y blog...purrrrrfect. Especially after having a chat with a brilliant friend I am a little more sanguine about it all.
Or not, maybe... *shaking my fist like him and him* and feeling like I want to ask this!
Someone else can break down the politics of it all, but I am interested in the heart of it all..at 3:30 am, no less.
I grew up with a filmmaker mother committed to the sharing of stories as a grand and courageous endeavor. I'm also the daughter of a man from the Old Country who also favored sharing stories as a political and cultural act. Might I add that my Old Country last name is a reference to telling the news! So storytelling to me is a lovely and generous reflection of a POC axiom (yeah, I don't remember which racial-ethnic group it was though I suspect everyone's culture believes something similar!) that shared joy is double the happiness and shared sadness cuts unhappiness in half.
PRIVILEGE IS KALEIDOSCOPIC which is what I felt like at least one of these women was trying to share in her stories: the NUANCE (ups and downs and all arounds) of how "privilege" for lighter-skinned women does and does not play out in various ways (facial features, weight/size/height, class, quality of physical movement, family, locales, other people's baggage, etc.).
Why not then -- when people share their stories -- just STAND for a few fracking minutes and tarry WITH THEM IN THEIR TRUTH (and pain, quite possibly) before automatically moving on to pay lip service and dash into a critique of what they did wrong or not enough of? This is aka the 'Yeah, okay, I get it...but fill-in-the-blank-critique.' No, but, for real that's the same ish (depending on your setting) clueless whitefolks or menfolk do to black people or women when they try to share their stories. It's the same circus, in many ways, just with different clowns as anyone who has ever sat in particular kinds of classrooms or attended or led particular kinds of anti-racism workshops knows! Heck, I'm guilty as charged!
Really though I'm only being mildly facetious when I say I'd rather not hop in the wayback machine just to runteldat about the arguable quality of the early privilege of being light-skinned during enslavement....which, you know, also meant garnering the "privilege" of being raped!
So what's the real solution after, if or when lighter-skinned women acknowledge their privilege? Then what? Wayment...who gets to decide who counts as lighter-skinned or browner-skinned? Who gets to dictate how either acknowledge their privilege and whether they do it right or wrong? Is there some kind of special threshold that lighter-skinned women are supposed to reach or acknowledge when they tell their stories according to the standards set by browner-skinned women? Umm, no. *cue my self-righteous defensiveness right.....NOW* Perhaps I am naive to believe that no one side should get to dictate the terms of the relationship, that no one's pain AS A HUMAN BEING SUPERSEDES anyone else's! Yasssssss! I say this as a child of diasporically blackalicious parents who experienced South African apartheid AND Southern segregation. How's that for a 2-for-1?! 'cause to quote one of my high-school era bands (REM) who sang the obvious: Everybody hurts..
Not so secretly though methinks that blog piece made me want to rage because it exposed me to myself. I've been battling with deliberate selfishness, empowered arrogance, impotent elitism, and BOOYAH! raging insekkurity! I know it to be true that I can be fracking intolerable in person and in print and I owe some of this gastroverbosity to "discovering" "feminism"* circa 1992 quite frankly.
The vocab* and what I came to believe were its immortal techniques* for thinking and behaving as a girl on the come-up to womanhood blasted open my world with a force that nothing else has yet to come close to replicating. *cue accusations of women like me blaming feminism/s* Yet now at the tinny age of 33 I am slowly recognizing that while the lexicon of "feminism" I apprenticed under and subsequently practiced has been radically enlightening and indubitably fabulash for my soul, it is also quite radically lacking the breath of life I seek to cultivate as I grow older, the heart relationships I wish to develop and the light I'd like to enter into one day on the other side of the other side! I am willing to accept responsibility for this, much of this is part of the journey of life.
Still when confronting the humanity of individuals struggling to live their lives in raced, gendered, classed etc. bodies I require something more. There is a deep ache, a yearning for something deeper. Spiritual transformation is licking at my heels and I keep running from it, but it keeps tripping me up. Years ago, I came across this intriguing metaphorically (?) able-ist quotation: "How vain is it to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live?!" In my youthful 20s I was already then somewhat a citizen of the world (tee hee) but still I felt indicted because I knew that I should never adventurously go round the world in 180 days or venture 20,000 leagues under the sea (fuggedaboutit!).
But now in my sweet gingerbread Jesus year I read it another way. I find myself convicted (natch!) by it as a reminder that even as we all need to suss out the 'rewards,' 'benefits' and consequences we experience in maintaining who we think we are, we also need to ask of ourselves and each other, What do YOU need or not need to heal in order to "stand up" and live? THIS, I think, is the heart of flesh** for me -- pure visions of spirit to spirit that we can recognize in each other, visions that are both soaring and scary as that London Eye thing I refused to ride back in the day (fuggedaboutit!).
But if I am going to honor that conviction in the spirit of community I should like for a solidarity earned through the heart of flesh and not by the demand for a pound of it.
Also, I'm tired now...
*I'm going to be thinking through more about what I mean with this word and the kind of feminisms I have been drawn to and practiced as a college scholar and in life after college.
** Term respectfully hijacked from and thoughts possibly prematurely spun off from Joan Chittister's Heart of Flesh.
*** For instance, I have frankly always seen myself as "regla" brown and when I was growing up I saw the girls who were lighter and darker than me catch hell, which made me glad as hell to just be somewheres in the middle where no one hassled me. Getting older, I had and continue to have browner-skinned people describe me as light-skinned. Umm, no. I get slightly defensive as all get out, lol even as they scoff at me like I am in denial. They don't get it though. My momma is a rich peanut butter color when she tans deeply, lol. My 102- year old Aunt Ruth is light bright and was offended when I once asked her if she was white when I was a wee thing. Them two are light to me. I ain't. Getit? Gotit? Good!
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