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.

Black Power

This century, decade and year have witnessed the exercise of power by persons of African descent in the Americas at previously unprecedented and virtually unimaginable levels.
May I call the roll?
Thomas Clarence, Condalezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donna Brazile, and Barack Hussein Obama, just to name a very few in just one field.
These black women and men wield and wielded their considerable power with the authority and endorsement of majority white (in power if not always in numbers) constituents and sponsors.
Their successes and those of many, many more bear witness to the great distance this nation has progressed from its slave-holding roots, slave-owning presidents and slave-dependent economic system.
But we have not moved any great distance from the racism that spawned the conquest of the inhabited Americas, rape and pillage of Africa, its nations, inhabitants and their descendants and continuing xenophobia manifested in Islamophobia and white supremacist ideologies.
The simple fact is that Americans of color - are black brown and beige - are regularly treated as second class non-citizens.
I remember how surprised was Oprah Winfrey when interviewing Shoshanna Johnson, the first African American woman prisoner of war on record, after her release in 2003 that the white soldiers who came to the rescue of her unit initially tried to leave her, doubting her nationality until a white soldier vouched for her. (Ironically, it was easier for them to believe that she was a black Iraqi - they do exist - than a black American.) She simply did not look like what they believed an American, or American soldier looked like.
I am not surprised by the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or the surrounding discussions. I am appreciative for the class implications of that discourse. For all of those who say that if this could happen to a man of Skip Gates' standing (class) then it could happen to anyone, it does. Everyday.
Now the stories are pouring out, particularly those of women and men who have access to the media. Both Dr. Rice (who had to argue with a jewelery salesperson that she wanted to see real, not imitation, pearls no matter the price) and Gen. Powell (who had to prove that he was the National Security Adviser to a person who did not believe that a black person held the job) have entered such stories in the public record.
Bloggers everywhere are posting the stories of lesser known persons who have been the victims of racial profiiling, particularly by the police.
President Obama has appealed for a national conversation on race, first after the high-tech lynching of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright and after the fraudulent arrest of Dr. Gates. Black folk have been having this conversation sice we got here, voluntarily or involuntarily.
It's well past and high time for white folk to have this conversation among themselves in comparable numbers. While the work of theorists and social critics is invaluable to this end, these conversations need to happen in white enclaves, congregations, clubs and around dinner tables.
One of the first topics: the acquisition of power by a few black and brown persons does not signal the end of racism or the advent of a post-racial society.
As Lani Guinier put in her 30 July post to the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"The undisputed historical backdrop for the porch encounter includes 240 years of chattel slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and 400-plus years of intergenerational wealth transfer during most of which time black people not only owned little property—they were property. In roughly 50 of the first 72 years of our country's first century, the presidents of the United States themselves owned slaves. In the infamous Dred Scott case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a black man had no rights that a white man need respect, five of the justices were from slaveholding families."
Power to the people.

I Am A Wo/man

I am a woman.
I am a man.
I am a person.
I am human.
I am somebody.

These ancestral affirmations refuted the twisted logic of the American slavocracy, Jane and Jim Crow and polite northern racism.
Their time has not yet passed.

The accomplishments of Barack Obama directly benefit him, his family, his children, his friends and his inner circle.
For the rest of us it has opened up a new and unimaginable experience:
We are told that our experiences of discrimination no longer matter, or are no longer even real because of his success.

The Black Church has been the bulwark of black peoples since the Candace's servant was baptized on the road to Damascus.
The Black Church is also, ironically and unfortunately, a bulwark of sexism and heterosexism.

I recently participated in a conversation with scores of black women, most of whom are pastors or preachers, who uncovered the widespread practice of male clergy regularly inviting them to preach and forgetting to pay them, sometimes for months, if ever.
The irony is apparent.
Many of these male preachers are lions of the Civil Rights movement who marched around in signs saying, "I AM A MAN."
For some of them, male identity was more important than human identity.

The silent Civil Rights protestors who marched in signs proclaiming, "I AM A MAN" were denying the dehumanizing agenda of white supremacist society with every breath.
They were demanding simple human (humane) recognition, which turns out not to be so simple after all.
Recognizing the full humanity of other persons requires full recognition of all of their rights, abilities, gifts and possibilities.

The male hegemony of the Black Church is not alone in seeking the power and privilege of white, male, hetero-patriarchal society for themselves. They are not alone in seeking a few more chairs to be added to the table of exclusion for their benefit, or even seeking to replace a few chair-holders.

There are white feminists who seek a place at the table for white women, no others need apply.
There are white gay men who believe that theirs is the only expression of Queer identity that exists or matters and the movement must be guided by them to achieve their goals, and theirs alone.

I am a woman.
I am because we/you are.
I AM.
I...