Blue-eyed Black

LOVE THE SKIN YOU'RE IN
My five-year-old son drew a picture of himself the other day. He talks quietly to himself while he draws. It's a cute little habit. I guess I do the same thing so I didn't mind it one bit. Just gave him a piece of paper and some crayons and let him draw on the floor while I worked on the computer.

"Now, I'm going to need brown for my face," he whispers. Scribble. Scribble. Scribble. "And I'll need blue for my eyes. So I'll look happy."

Whoa, wait a minute! My fingers froze in midair over the keyboard. Blue? When did he get blue eyes? I looked down at his self-portrait (which was looking pretty good, except for the eyes) and I said, "You have brown eyes, remember. Nice brown eyes."

Didn't matter, he was going to have blue eyes if it was the last thing he did. Having blue eyes was going to make him happy. That was a wake-up call for me. I made a mental note to be more intentional about giving my three 'brown-eyed' little Negro children a reason to be happy about how they look.

STIRRING THINGS UP
About a year ago, while shopping for high resolution stock photography online, I found a picture of a young black man with very fair skin and coffee brown eyes. I remember thinking instantly, "Here's my Isaac." As in Isaac Hunt, the main character in The Making of Isaac Hunt, of course.

That image fit the bill almost perfectly. This young model is handsome and fair-skinned. Real manly looking. Trouble was, he had brown eyes. So after a little editing magic, I made them blue. Yep. On purpose.

About a couple months after the book came out I had a signing. One black woman came up to the table and loudly proclaimed, without so much as a hello, 'You got problems.' She pointed at Isaac's blue eye. It disturbed her. A blue-eyed black.

I shrugged it off and made a mental note to be more disturbing. On purpose.

Get Back, Black

"If you're black, get back.
If you're brown, get down.
If you're yellow, you're mellow.
If you're white, you're right."

Those are the words of a little jingle I learned when I was young. I shared it with a white Alabama woman, maybe ten years younger than me, and her jaw dropped. She'd never heard the ditty and she was appalled. One, that she as a product of the Deep South, had never heard the tune. And two, that there was such a tune.

Honey, I said to myself, there's probably a lot more you don't know about what black folks have to deal with in the South. Not having to deal with things like that is one of the benefits of white privilege.

I saw something on BET yesterday (yes, Reggie R., I do watch BET TV sometimes). It was part of BET's Meet the Faith program. Their topic, Anything But Black, stirred up some facinatingly old school results.

Here's a quote from the show's transcript (italics mine):

Following a montage of interviews about challenges some young mixed-race New Yorkers face and a review of a social experiment that observed young black children choosing White dolls over Black dolls because the children said White was good and Black was bad prompted another lively discussion. Reverend Bryant says he’s troubled more people don’t realize men, all men, originate from the same continent. ”I’m absolutely African American and the reality is if man originates from Africa whether you are from Ireland, Switzerland or Greenland there is African inside you.” Coleman added, “Race isn’t biological, race is political”

Ahh, the black doll, white doll experiment, I remember it well. Sadly, so do too many black mothers and fathers. I was shocked to see the little black boys and girls choose the white doll again and again. Dressed exactly like the black doll, made from the same mold, but considered ugly, bad, undesirable.

I don't agree with everything the minister (Rev. Bryant, quoted above) said about racial origins, but one thing is for sure, race isn't biological (and it's not biblical either). Unfortunately, in America, the results of the human genome experiment came a few generations too late.

How will the damage to the self image of black children be repaired? I really don't know. But it's clear we need another ditty to which to march. And it wouldn't hurt to start a few conversations of reconciliaton across the color line--speaking the truth (about my American life, my children, my hopes, my disappointments ...) in love and with commitment.