Black and Beautiful and Sunburned

"Can you tan?"

"Do you burn?"
Assumptions about the normatively and inherent value of whiteness - "fair" being light and attractive - are imposed on me as a black woman every day, living in a white supremacist society. I am regularly asked to give an account of my presumptively alternate biology, imagined to be fundamentally different from the interrogator's own normative experience of being human.

"Can you tan?"

"Do you burn?"

I am expected to answer when questioned. To explain myself and my race. Public access to my body is unquestioned.

And deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty. 

How can something, let alone someone, be black and beautiful?

So never mind that Song of Solomon 1:5 has a simple conjunction, black am I and beautiful, (and emphasizes her blackness by opening with it), a myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with "I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely." Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says.

Some say, they "get" that, but (negate that "getting" with their next comment) doesn't verse 6 say that she is sunburned, therefore, she can't be black - that's what the notes in my study bible say...

As though being black and sunburned were impossible, as impossible as being black and beautiful.

If the text had not said that the woman was as black as the tents of Qedar - as black as the black goats' hair tents woven from the famed goats of Qedar renowned for their beautiful black coats in antiquity, but instead was as white as a lily and that the sun had "gazed" on her, white (and other readers) would have no problem imagining that her lily-white complexion was damaged by the sun, along with all of the class implications associated with laboring outdoors. 

But the antithetical constructions of blackness and beauty, blackness and normatively, even blackness and sunburn mean that far too many readers cannot hear that the woman in the text ruined her beautiful black Qedari completion with a sunburn, in spite of what the text says.

Yes, I am black! and radiant - 

O city women watching me - 

As black as Kedar's goat hair tents 

Or Solomon's fine tapestries. 

Will you disrobe me with your stares? 

The eyes of many morning suns 

Have pierced my skin, and now I shine 

Black as the light before the dawn.

 Rabbi Marcia Falk, 

The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible

Whiteness and assumptions about whiteness permeate nearly all things in our society like an anti-light obscuring non-Eurocentric realities.

Christian Kidnappers

There is so much wrong with the Christian missionaries who claimed to be relocating orphans from Haiti to the Dominican Republic, that I scarcely know where to begin.
1) The children were not orphans and they knew it and they lied about it.
Parents have come out of the woodwork saying that they entrusted their children to the missionaries out of their desperation to provide for their children. In some cases, they were convinced by brochures they were shown with swimming pools and and other amenities. The place in the brochure was not their destination and by their own admission they had not yet built their "orphanage" or even hired personnel to work with the children.
2) Taking children from loving parents simply because they are poor does not help children or their parents.
The assumption that the children would be better off apart from their parents and in the custody of white Americans is racist, classist and imperialistic. These missionaries showed no interest in Haitian people, culture or society, and have no interest in strengthening Haitian families - counter to the so-called family values trumpeted by social and religious conservatives.
3) There was no orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
The missionaries lied about taking the children to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. They had not built or staffed an orphanage, had hired no child care specialists, no one certified to treat traumatized children, or (as far as I can tell) had any medical personnel whatsoever. They had simply rented space in a hotel.
4) The missionaries knew that a letter of permission from a local pastor was insufficient to cross a national border.
The missionaries were told at every turn not to try to take children out of the country without passports and visas. The missionaries knew that they needed passports and visas to cross borders, but claimed white privilege in Jesus' name to kidnap those children - illegally transporting those children under false pretenses and attempting to cross a national border.
5) Neither Jesus nor Haiti needs those kinds of Christians or their dubious help.
Children are the most vulnerable and most impoverished people on this planet and that is particularly the case in Haiti. Helping the poor and disenfranchised, especially when they are children in a central tenet of Christianity. Breaking up their families because their families are poor and desperate and profiting of of children - whether financially or not - is an abomination.
They neither know nor care about the cultural context of Haiti. Their actions actually deepen the problem of restavec children, children who are sent away from their homes to wealthier people, sometimes relatives, in hopes that they will have a better life, at the price of broken homes and frequently broken bodies. Restavec children are regularly physically and sexually abused.
6) These white Christian missionaries demonstrate an unmitigated disdain for black families and culture.
These white Christian missionaries demonstrate the links between white supremacy and Western Christianity. They believe that they have the right to do anything they want with black bodies based on the written word of a white man. They completely disregarded the legal authority of every black Haitian authority who told them something contradictory to their imperialistic desires.
7) White Christianity sanctifies white imperial desire.
Since they decided that what they wanted was good and God-sanctioned, every opposing opinion has been demonized. So the missionaries justify their lies, deceit and crimes in the name of Jesus under the sacred canopy of good intentions and clutch their bibles in their jail cells singing hymns.

I want to know if they would rescue/traffic all of the poor children in Haiti. If they are so committed to poor black children, what are they doing with/for the poor black children in the US? What is their mission plan for the families, parents and sexually active young adults of reproductive age? Will they put an end to sexual reproduction after they have depopulated Haiti of children?

I believe that these children were trafficked, that they were going to be made available for adoption under false pretenses for a fee (based on CNN's reporting). I am horrified by their actions and hope they rot in an underfunded Haitian jail in this life and in hell in the next. And I don't even believe in hell. But for these Christians, hell just ought to be an option.

Update: Eight of the jailed missionaries slipped a note to an NBC producer claiming they were lied to by their leader Laura Silsby. All of the evidence CNN has uncovered points to duplicity and deception on the part of Ms. Silsby. It appears that she misled her own people. She sounds like the worst kind of zealot. Not content with risking her own life, she has endangered the lives and cost the freedom of her trusting co-religionists as she schemed to steal black children to sell adopt. Allegedly.

Privilege and Peril

When I teach about privilege - white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied - I also teach about peril. I'm careful to point out that privilege and peril regularly coexist in individuals and communities to avoid setting up an "oppression olympics." For example, the peril I experience as a black person and as a woman coexists with the privilege I experience from my socioeconomic status and the privilege I experience from my hierarchical standing as a professor and as a priest.

Apparently, that's just me. I have been watching other folk who also enjoy privilege while living with peril who have no interest in articulating or acknowledging their own privilege. In this case it is white privilege. I have been watching and listening as some white gay men dominate the equality movement articulate gay identity over and apart from black identity, build on and steal from the Civil Rights Movement and proclaim that black liberation is "over."

I have also observed white women who are deeply concerned about the status of women in the academy and the church invest in, nurture and support white women and only white women. For these women, women of color are not women - unless we want to support the white women's agenda. Support for women of color is called divisive, shifting the focus from gender to race and ethnicity.

Neither group, white gay men nor white women in these contexts acknowledge the power they have from their white privilege. But they use it. It is a peculiar thing to see white privilege wrapped in a mantle imperiled victimhood.

It seems to me the movements for women's equality and LGBTQ equality when divorced from any concern about the status of women of color or queer colored folk is not really about civil or human rights. On one level these culture wars are about the fury white folk feel when their white privilege is not universally acclaimed and honored. As a result, some white gay men have no problem using sexism or racism in their campaigns for - not equal rights - but the restoration of their privilege. And, some white women cannot identify or partner with women of color in achieving equity for all women because their womanhood is intrinsically linked with their whiteness, rendering women of color unrecognizable as women.

Unarticulated privilege is still privilege. White privilege is nearly unescapable.