Tatum Chapter 3: "Is my skin brown because I drink chocolate milk?"

Tatum writes in Chapter 3:

"In her book Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks relates a conversation she had with a Black woman frustrated by her daughter's desire for long blond hair, despite their family's effort to affirm their Blackness. Observing the woman's dark skin and straightened hair, she encouraged the mother to examine her own attitudes about skin colour and hair texture to see what messages she might be communicating to her child by the way she constructed her own body image"(46).

A question that arises out of this text is: Why do we all feel pressured to transform our natural bodies into artifices of "beauty"? And, more revealingly, what ideal form are we inclined to strive for, if there is a single particular one, and why have we adopted it?

This is one of the most fundamental and pressing questions that we can ask ourselves at any time, in any place. I can't answer it for everyone, but I think that if we all really gave it some thought, we might peel off layers that we put on, or we might feel more conviction for those that we do. But it is one thing to internalize self-destructive ideals without thinking about it, another to be conscious of the way we "carry" and care for ourselves.

And secondly, how much of this hurt (I don't know how else to describe it) can be traced to the way young minds integrate examples that older generations provide into their personal understanding of the "way things are"?

This is again a large question but one that may elicit a greater understanding of our place in between the world we inherit and the way we leave it to future generations. When confronting this issue, my thoughts often turn to lines from Kanye West's "Bring Me Down" (Late Registration, 2005). West maintains:

"You see, if you ever wanted to be anything
It always be somebody that would shoot down any dream
There always be haters, that's the way it is
Hater niggas marry hater bitches and have hater kids."

Unfortunately, we are all fallible human beings, we internalize pain, insecurity, and anger and also are the ones given the responsibility of preserving and propagating human life. The mother described in bell hook's Sisters of the Yam has for whatever reason chosen to straighten her hair, and I think it is very important not to judge her choice as a type of weakness, in the context of what Tatum describes as an "affirmation of their Blackness." Her daughter has chosen to dye her hair blonde. This choice may have nothing to do with negating her Blackness but with affirming some other ideal. Unfortunately, for both women, the ideal form they embody is one that is not natural. But everyone does this, supercede the natural to become an ideal. Hopefully the ideal will be a healthy one.

As discouraging as the predicament may seem, there is hope. This hope resides in the power that we hold as inhabitants of this earth, the power to transform the world we have been given into something better for our children.

West continues in a positive affirmation of this very power conferred by our own responsibility:

"But they gon have to take my life fore they take my drive
Cause when I was barely livin that's what kept me alive
Just the thought that maybe it could be better than where we at this time
Make ya out of this grind before I'm out of my mind."

--http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/

Reading my last post, I can understand how it might seem that I was making light of a serious subject. In no way was I trying to be facetious. I was frustrated at the dialogue, and wanted to simplify my point and make it as clear as possible. I was having trouble getting my head around the way "culture" and "race" are brought together. It seemed that the more you thought about race and culture, the less sense it made to try to define them.

Yet I do understand how, in a multicultural society, cultural items and representations should reflect the true nature of that society. This is not always the case, and this point was made particularly clear in the reading. We look at prime time television, advertisements, the image of "Jesus Christ," fashion houses, "old boys" clubs--all different reflections and determinating forces of values, and notice how dominant the image of "white" as power or beauty is in many spheres.

I would like to think that this trend is changing. If I understand Berry's point correctly, however, I am led to think about how while it may not be strictly white people in charge in today's culturally dominant or "mainstream" North American society, it has been white people that set the terms of power and how power is to be gained. That is, the major players are not necessarily white, but the game that they must play to be powerful is one whose rules were determined for the most part by white people years ago.

I am thinking now of the documentary in theatres now, In the Shadow of the Moon, about the American astronauts who traveled to the moon in the past century. It strikes me today that all of the 24 astronauts were white men. It was not explicit that this was a cause for concern back when the spacecrafts were actually being built. While this fact glares at you throughout the film, we cannot discount the cultural achievement of actually building the Apollo spacecrafts and going up out into space. That they were all white speaks to something very ugly about the American culture of the time. But the dominant social, economic, and political culture of America sent human beings into outer space. The science behind and experience of space travel was interesting to me, and seemed of primary interest to the astronauts themselves.

Unfortunately the facts speak for themselves but I would like to hope for the future. Whatever culture may come to be, substantially or meaningfully, hopefully we will be open-minded enough not to uphold any one culture over another, or any one race over another. Hopefully we will be open-minded enough not to engage in any form of prejudice, traditional or otherwise.

How the zebra got its stripes

In thinking more about race and racism, my thoughts turned to something that I feel contributes a lot to the discussion. First I considered "black and white difference." I looked at this for awhile:

Here the difference between black and white is clearly demonstrated. We have differentiated black colouring from white colouring.

But then I thought more about zebras, and the fact that the stripes on no two zebras are exactly alike. This made me think more about difference, and what differences are important.

It is logically impossible not to discriminate against individuals in arguments like Dei's. While professing to be "anti-racist," Dei's theory rests on the idea of "whiteness," a general category that groups many individuals under one title, one "race."

Everybody sees the world differently. Categories such as "whiteness" are created to group more that one point of view together. But it is impossible for two different people to share the exact same outlook and not be the same person. The use of categories like "whiteness" overlooks the natural and individual differences inherent between any individuals, whether they are "members" of that "race" or not. Difference is not a grouping together of black and white and comparing the two. Difference is the idea that no two individuals are exactly alike.

The least discriminant system would have an infinite number of categories. Once difference is admitted as being calculable under general headings that group individual difference together, it is left to the whim of a personal judge where the category lines are drawn. Categories used in the way Dei uses "Whiteness" lump together individual subjects. They make them objects of racism, their subjective character being judged by the colour of their skin.

Look at that zebra long enough and you will not help but be amazed!

clarification of Dei's point:

When I said that "...Dei's form of racism, involved his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not..."
I meant more that he names a category "Whiteness," then assigns certain values, practices, and modes of being that go along BY NATURE of WHITENESS, then assigns those values, practices, and modes of being (in his view, being racist) to every single person to whom one could assign the category "White." It sounds like racism to me when anyone starts discussing patterns of behaviour based on the natural dispostion (resulting from a specific position) of race, regardless of what race is being analyzed.
Maybe I am naive in thinking that another route is available to us in countering racism. But to me, to fight racism with more ideas about what a specific race confers on people "of that race" is to perpetuate distinctions and value systems based on race. I don't know how we can, as a "human" race, make racism history, but I really hope that we do.

first response to the concept of "Whiteness"

In the introduction to The Great White North? (Carr and Lund), George J. Sefa Dei writes that

"Racism is about maintaining White dominance and supremacy" (viii).

And later:
"As alluded to, Whiteness cannot itself be essentialized, especially when embodied Whiteness intersects along gender, class, and sexual lines....Notwithstanding these complications, however, it is also equally important to reiterate that there is a systemization and structuralization of dominance within social institutions that perpetuate White privilege and other forms of oppressions "inter-generationally" and/or through time and space, irrespective of class, gender, religious, language and sexual differences, particularly among dominant groups" (x).

Two questions arose for me out of the reading of this introduction. First, I would like to ask whether racism, fundamentally, is not the stigmatization and differentiation, or polarization of a number of people, based on their race. Racism and supremacy seem to go hand in hand; they both segregate or categorize people based on race, and then apply certain values to that race as a whole. Is racism the act of making race an issue? If so, Dei is he is singling out a particular race and identifying that race with a certain quality. If this fundamental definition of racism does not hold, or racism is not about the polarization of people based on race, then Dei must rethink his terms: he cannot define racism based on an idea of "white," because his definition rests on and expands out of a polarization of a particular group based on race. In making claims about what Whiteness does to people who are white, is Dei himself engaging in a form of racism, a racism that is not about "maintaining White dominance and supremacy"?
So is Dei's form of racism, (i.e. his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not) a good sort of racism, something that he thinks everybody needs to do more of?
Is racism ever good?

Secondly, I am trying to understand the notion of "embodied" vs. "essential" Whiteness.

What is the Meaning of "Cultural Identity"?

"Cultural Identity" is an interesting idea because it is the joining together of the idea of culture and that of identity. While sounding simple enough, it is probably a good idea to see how the ideas of culture and of identity interact.

Culture can be described as a collection of ideas or values or "norms" that reaches over many single individuals, that endures over time and informs a collective space. Culture is something greater and more powerful than any individual. It is a world of beliefs about the world to which individuals subscribe and feel a part of. However, it must be asked whether, in the way that "if a tree fell and no one was around to hear it, did it made a noise?", if a culture existed but no one was around to propagate it, does it actually exist?

This is where the question of identity comes in. A culture must be subscribed to by individuals that "identify" with it. Identification is a process by which something is seen as being identical to another. In "identification" as it is applied to individuality, the individual actually sees their self as identical, or at least a part of their "selves" (an idea that opens up a whole other issue about split/multiple identities within a coherent self) is identical, with the ideal of an individual delineated in the perspective of a particular set of norms. So "cultural identity" is the linking together of a collective body of "culture" with an individual act of "identification." What is interesting to ask ourselves is whether we are really in a position to "identify" with cultures. If people argue that culture is something that you are born into and grow up with simply by being in the presence of others in a society, then "cultural identity" would imply a being "without culture" enough to actively identify with it. In this way, identification involves a form of adoption.

What then happens to "culture"? Is culture something we choose? Identification involves some sort of choice, some sort of stepping back and evaluating the singlular "identity" of two separate things. Thus when we talk about what it means when we identify with one culture, more than one cultures, one big "multiculture," we are talking about the way the individual relates to culture, and how culture is changed by who relates to it. The two are brought together in the form of "identification," even though the one doing the identifying is inherently already part of something--a particular position in time and space that is part of a global and all-inclusive history--that can sometimes be left out of the equation. Once we distinguish one culture from another we overlook the inherent paradox of choosing an identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o

This is a great example of how culture is something that anyone can identify with.
And in identification, the culture itself is renewed.