We espouse 'black is beautiful', but the true image of blackness is ugly

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/09/i-hate-being-a-black-man

by wozniacki • 13 years ago

23 10 13 years ago

wozniacki• 13 years ago

Some context and elaboration:

CNN's Don Lemon talks with a columnist ( Orville Lloyd Douglas )who wrote about his hatred for the color of his own skin.

Full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DujnL7w5ic4

Shorter version:

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/11/17/...

Edit: Fuller video added.

davidsmith8900• 13 years ago

- Im still trying to figure out why people care about how other people feel about them.

georgecmu• 13 years ago

Here's a simple answer: "people" are materially dependent on interactions with "other people", and outcome of these interactions is to a large degree determined by how "other people feel about them".

RougeFemme• 13 years ago

If you live in isolation or aren't a member of a group that is perceived negatively by a significant number of people, it's very easy to NOT care. It's a lot harder when how people feel about you affects you - every day - in your ability to get/maintain a job, get promoted at that job, buy/rent a dwelling, finance a business, enter a restaurant/elevator/bus without causing a ripple. . .

daviddaviddavid2• 13 years ago

(disclosure: black guy here)

I applaud the author for voicing a perspective that rarely sees the light of day. Here are a couple thoughts I had while reading this article:

1. The term "self-hatred" always begs elaboration w.r.t. why one hates oneself. The hatred can come from internalizing perceptions of ugliness, criminality, dirtiness, etc. These are all very different things and making general statements about an underspecified self-hatred will lead to confusions.

2. Related to the above point, self-hatred is often talked about from a female perspective because what's being talked about is self-hatred stemming from internalizing a sense of female beauty that is at odds with blackness.

3. Likewise, self-hatred (of the ugliness variety) is almost never talked about from a male perspective because many aspects of black maleness do cohere with general perceptions of male beauty (and this despite the fact that black males are still horribly underrepresented on fashion runways).

4. Self-hatred of the criminality sort is very complex and has to do with a number of factors, among which are darkness of skin, body size, clothing, dialect, loudness of voice, gait, body-language, facial features, etc. I personally am of medium complexion, am 5'6" with a slight build and if you spoke to me on the phone you would certainly think I was white. In my entire life I have never thought that someone chose not to sit next to me because I am a black male. My guess is that body size and darkness of skin and facial features are the determining factors in the difference between myself and the author (basically, I look much less like the prototypical scary black guy than the author).

5. The psychology of "disgust" is very interesting and depressing. The idea that people are viscerally repulsed by others and that the object of disgust could internalize subject's feelings is fascinating. This is something that isn't specific to hatred of blacks, of course. Jews and gays come to mind as other groups on the receiving end of this feeling. I've never felt a sense of self-disgust regarding my race.

__pThrow• 13 years ago

I don't know what it's like being black, and I am not trying to diminish your feelings or the author's on this, and thank you for acknowledging how Jews and gays feel.

  I am Jewish.
  I am an older programmer
  I am older
  I am short

  I am slightly disabled (not enough to be disabled, but enough
  to make exercise problematic, programming difficult)

  I am overweight (see above)
  I am divorced

  I have lost my kids, and I will state their mother turned them
    against me, and as I say that, I can feel the thoughts of so
    many people blaming me and labeling me, but if someone only
    knew

  (I am thus an older bitter white male one of the few people the
    media and feminists can eagerly pile on and criticize and yes
    literally tell us we should feel criminal about (don't be that
    guy campaigns)).

  I am mostly unemployed these days.
  I had thought once I would be successful now I am 
    the furthest thing from successful
  I worry friends and relatives will see through this throwaway.

A ton of other issues as well.

My sense of why I hate myself: what a total colossal failure in every realm: family, work, social. The family part really hurts.

Not sure whether I will click [reply] or [<-]

daviddaviddavid2• 13 years ago

I sincerely thank you for hitting [reply].

deckiedan• 13 years ago

No doubt, there is still a huge amount of latent racism and bigotry around, and I think it will take a few generations more at least before racism is truly as past-tense as we would hope. I could be wrong, and I apologise in advance if this is taken the wrong way, but I get the feeling it's a lot worse in the Americas than in the UK, at least, but I have come across gross racism in every corner of the world I've been to. In the Mediterranean, there's huge stereotyping of non-locals. I grew up in Cyprus, and was shocked at times by the attitudes towards (for instance) Filipinos and Russians.

However, one thing I've found, myself, as a white British male, living now in the UK, in the north in a not especially multicultural city (alas!), is that just being a fairly tall young man in general is a scary thing for others. If I sit down on a bus, generally the only others who would chose to sit next to me are other men. If I sit down next to a woman, they instinctively turn away. Chances are that they're wondering if I sat next to them because I think they're hot, as that's the ONLY image the media presents of men. Shallow, sexist, misogynistic, egocentric pornography-reading adolescents who refuse to grow up. (My description is of how I perceive the typical media representation of men, not how I actually perceive us as a gender - as if a whole gender could possibly fit into one description!)

Mike Moore made a joke of it, in his "Stupid White Men" book, but there is a truth to the thought that pretty much all of the big league institutional wrongdoing that's been done in the world for quite a while now has been done either by, or for, white men (The Khmer Rouge and LRA being notable exceptions). In no particular order: The crusades, the Native American & Australian massacres and other atrocities, Apartheid and all the European invasions and selling into slavery of Africans before that, Nazism & both World Wars, all the recent banking scandals, the KKK, the America/Vietnam war, European/USSR communism, the invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan, the IRA and sectarian violence in Ireland, virtually every ecological disaster of the last 200 years, the insane official racial segregation in the USA up until less than a generation ago, multinationals polluting water sources of villages in India for commercial gain, destroying whole islands in Thailand and Malaysia to obtain minerals, the whole concept of "sex-tourism" and all the slavery, prostitution & poverty that come from that - and so on.

The whole concept of 'white-guilt' certainly has plenty of food for ammunition, and it doesn't take much for white men to get a pretty messed up complex about all this too.

We, as humans, have really shitty stereotypes of each other. Since we live in a media saturated environment, we do tend to get both bad self-images, and images of others from that. We desperately need good /real/ relationships with others to actually realise we're all pretty messed up, and all have the capacity for overwhelming generosity and love, and at the same time soul-crushing evil. It's the human condition.

All that said, I'm really sad that the OP has this experience in his city, and pray for the day when people don't find their self-image, or image of others in what colour their skin or hair or height, weight, sexuality, religion, shape, size, or cultural/racial background is, but instead are free in themselves, and in their society, to define themselves by what they choose to be.

I think I just wrote more than I intended...

mrng• 13 years ago

I remember Tim Russ ("Tuvok") describing his encounter with Avery Brooks ("Sisko"); Tim said Avery was "physically intimidating"; Tim is no skinny-fairy, either - but one can easily see that, besides cultural hangups, a physically imposing body plus a certain assertive attitude generates the same reaction around you.

RazvanPanda• 13 years ago

Similar story, Angel Densetsu: http://www.mangareader.net/178/angel-densetsu.html

"The story is of Kitano Seiichirou, a very kind and pure-hearted young man, with a horrifying, monstrous face. People being what they are, they think he's a terrifying delinquent, and there are plenty of chance misunderstandings (coupled with Kitano's convenient inability to understand what's happening around him) that propel him into the position of "school guardian", a.k.a. head thug on campus"

We espouse 'black is beautiful', but the true image of blackness is ugly

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