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.

Peace Be Upon Us

The Holy Qur'an, like all scripture, contains life-giving and death-dealing words. Christians, even when quoting memorized scripture, sometimes know little about their own sacred texts and even less about those of others.
As President Obama invites the Muslim and Western worlds (as though they were separate and distinct) into renewed conversation and mutual understanding, I offer a few verses from the Qur'an for contemplation.

Quranic reflections on peace:
Do not make Allah, by your oaths, a hindrance to your being righteous and observing your duty to God, including making peace among humankind. (2.224)

You believers! When you go out (to fight) in the way of Allah, be careful to discern, and do not say to anyone who offers you peace: "You are not a believer." (4.94, in part)

Go to Pharaoh and say: Look! We are two messengers of your Lord. So let the children of Israel go with us, and do not torment them. We bring you a token from your Lord. And peace will be for the one who follows right guidance. (20.47)

Peace on me the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised alive! Such was Jesus, son of Mary: a statement of the truth concerning which some doubt. (19.33-34)

If two parties of believers fall to fighting, then make peace between them. And if one party of them does wrong to the other, fight that one which does wrong till it returns to the ordinance of Allah; then, if it returns, make a just peace between them, and act equitably. Look! Allah loves the equitable. (49.9)

A mention of the mercy of your Lord to God's servant Zachariah.
When Zachariah cried to his Lord a cry in secret,
Saying: My Lord! Look! My bones grow feeble and my head is shining with grey hair, and I have never lacked blessing in prayer to You, my Lord. Look! I fear my kinsfolk after me, since my wife is barren. Oh, give me from Your presence a successor who shall inherit from me and inherit (also) the house of Jacob. And make him, my Lord, acceptable (to You).
(It was said to him): Zachariah! Look! We bring you tidings of a son whose name is John; we have given the same name to none before. He said: My Lord! How can I have a son when my wife is barren and I have reached infirm old age? One said: So (it will be). Your Lord says: It is easy for Me, even as I created you before, when you were nothing.
Zachariah said: My Lord! Show me some sign. He said: Your token is that you, with no physical infirmity, shall not speak to humankind for three nights. Then Zachariah came out to his people from the sanctuary, and signified to them: Glorify your Lord at break of day and fall of night.
John! Hold fast the Scripture. And we gave him wisdom when a child, and compassion from Our presence, and purity; and he was devout, and dutiful toward his parents. And he was not arrogant, rebellious.
Peace on him the day he was born, and the day he dies and the day he shall be raised alive!
And make mention of Mary in the Scripture, when she had withdrawn from her people to a chamber looking East, and had chosen seclusion from them. Then We sent unto her Our Spirit and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect human. (19.3-17)

Food for thought.

Swine Flu, Strangers and Neighbors

Ah-choo!
God bless me! Don't let me get what you got!
Please God, save me from the Swine Flu!
We should close the borders!
Pigs are filthy. People who consort with pigs are worse.
God bless us!
God bless the US.

I have heard some of the most scandalous xenophobic claims in the wake of our mild pandemic. And I don't even watch Dobbs, Hannity or Limbaugh.

We are our sisters' keepers.
We are our brothers' keepers.
We are called to love our neighbors and yes, even complete strangers, as much as we love ourselves. Whatever we do (or fail to do) to and for those whom we deem completely undesirable and unwelcome we do to God-In-Human-Flesh.

Mexicans and other Latin Americans are indigenous to this continent.
The overwhelming majority of so-called Americans are immigrants and in some cases, abductees. The founding of the United States of America is an exercise in illegal immigration and attempted genocide.

The small Mexican town in which the 2009 H1N1 virus is believed to have originated is also home to a US pork production farm. There may be a connection, there may not. But the peoples of the US and Mexico are intertwined on both sides of the border.
Our economies - legal and illegal - are conjoined.
Our crime victims are linked by American guns and ammunition.

We should pray for all of the peoples on the American double continent, including and especially Mexico:
I pray for the Mexican people who are dependent on tourism and have barely recovered from the previous years' hurricanes. I pray for the people in Mexico who are being decimated by violence funded by American drug users and their Mexican suppliers. I pray for Mexican and other Latin@ immigrants who are subject to abuse, violence and even death in the US for working to support themselves and their families. And I pray for Americans of all ethnicities who scapegoat other people.

May we remember that we are all, collectively the image of God who became the womb-fruit of a human woman, to be more like us that we might be more like God.