colorism

This Woman’s Work III: A Foreword

Posted on by karyn lynn morton

A Modern Day Tale:

“…but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind! ” -Virginia Wolf

It was 2018, I was working in a federal government office, where I had worked since 2004, amid moves and changes in everything from job title to the way I logged into my computer. People had come and gone, and I was still plugging away. My workplace had transformed from this very robust, albeit disheveled and disorganized office, like the set of Barney Miller, to this very sterile building. It was cold, soulless. Clean and neat, but like a psychopath, it lacked a genuine personality and flavor. It wasn’t even vanilla. Very often my spirit felt held captive.

Welcome to Dystopia.

Culture and diversity are kaleidoscopes. No matter which way you turn, there is rich color and a soundless rhythm you can still feel in those same places music makes move. Some White Americans are devoid of culture, so they latch on to the fallacy of the American Dream as their identity. When one can only see themselves as important through a lens of monetary and positional success, money and power become the things that mean the most to you. Similarly those of us who embrace our many cultures, I for example am a Black woman, of the hip hop generation, educated, urban, and a Detroiter, have an identity beyond the tools use to subjugate most of society… money and power. Most of the White people that I know and consider friends are very cultured… whether that be spiritual, regional, ancestral, you name it. And in this cold and sterile environment, cold and sterile White men had infiltrated this once robust and diverse group of people. Money and power trumped (pun intended) public service, employee development, and humanity.

In practice, these White men wanted me to turn over my brain to their whim… and I wasn’t built that way. I am of the “Mama Said Knock You Out”, “Knuck if you Buck” generation of Black women with a killer side eye, a big ass brain, and a deadly vocabulary. So as they tried to force us into servitude, held us down and forced disciplinary action and termination down our throats, I refused their poison. Instead of gouging out our eyes, they made us watch our ancestral sisters walk the green mile, cardboard box in hand, to remind us of our punishment should we disobey.

It was a pure mind fuck!

While this wasn’t unique to any particular women in the office, Black women were on the front lines. It was almost like they hired newbies to remind the old school folks just what would happen to us if we were bold. A few days in the door, and the writing on the wall was clear… do our bidding or get sold. I watched them come and go like barren slave girls, sold off, cast off. And although I knew their pain, I could at least find solace in the fact that the powers that be were threatened by my big ass brain and deadly vocabulary. I also knew that I was more competent than anyone above me, and being the smartest person in the room is a sign to find the nearest exit. You are the prey.

My daily experience seemed like a cross between films I had seen on the gestapo and life on the plantation. Overseers watched over us and used bullying, threats, harassment, and discrimination as whips upon our backs. I got paid a nice sum, so it wasn’t the horror of involuntary human subjugation, but it was inhumane all the same. To shield themselves, our overseers did the bidding of the powerful… and no one seemed to do it with more enthusiasm than other Black people. A Black woman in particular. The personification of self-hate.

A self-proclaimed minister and counselor, she was so blinded by feigned power and control, she could neither see nor feel the sting of her own abuse. Her own personal demons lashed out at us, all younger, more aesthetically pleasing, and well liked. She was Black and cracked… and not with the beauty of kintsuroi but with the fury of karma. If you didn’t kiss her ass she disliked you more, and if you did, it was only a set-up to stab you in the back. She used stereotypes to paint us as loud, lazy, Black girls with bad attitudes. Behind closed doors her White friendly smile turned into a self-hatred scowl and her fake endearing voice turned into a Newports and Colt 45 growl. She thought she was keeping us in line like a den mother, but in all actuality she just proved that Black people can be racist towards one another. She was the antithesis of freedom. Her presence was the penitentiary.

The workplace was not a place for me to develop my talents into skills, and serve my country. Instead, it was the realization of my intersectional position. My race, my sex, and my race paired with my sex, along with my age, after 40, became these identities that both made me proud and also served to marginalize me into professional pariahhood. I felt alone. I started to share my experiences out of necessity, so I could see if anyone could feel me and maybe help me navigate this space.

“Your silence will not protect you.” -Audrey Lorde

Suddenly, I had a hundred other examples and stories and anecdotes from Black women who assured me I wasn’t alone in dystopia. Soon, every group of Black women I came into contact with had discourse that would read like an anthology on the plight of sistas on the modern day plantation. I was swimming in a sea of support, and it made me realize that like Kimberlé Crenshaw before me, there didn’t just have to be one Harriet to lead us through the maze of patriarchy, racism, sexism, ageism, and colorism to freedom. I too could be in that number.

Come with me on an exploration of how Black women experience the workplace, and how despite our trauma, we continue to succeed and elevate with style and grace. Only through the sharing of information, can we expose how limiting these practices are to corporate America with the creativity and innovation Black women bring to the table. We must take our seats at the table armed with our manumission papers. We must free ourselves. Furthermore, perhaps just one somebody will refuse to participate in this exercise of inhumanity, drop their weapons, and free themselves from dystopian thought. We don’t have to join them to beat them!

The Art of War

Posted on by karyn lynn morton

“He only like you cuz you are light skinned with long hair.”

….light, bright, and damn near white.

Are you mixed?

#teamlightskinned

The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice.

You are pretty for a brown skinned girl.

“Don’t stay in the sun too long, you don’t need to get darker”

———

Okay first, let’s get this out of the way.

This shit is DUMB and it is like feeding racists a power pill. We cannot continue to give power to systems rooted in black oppression. Period!

———-

Light skin privilege… as real as it might be, it is not the same as white privilege. In fact, it only only has power because we continue to subscribe to these whitewashed ideas of beauty, importance, and intellect, when we know better. We allow someone else’s supremacy to affect how we see ourselves and one another. It’s the art of war. A civil war results in chaos within and a sense of accomplishment and peace to the instigator.

1. According to Sun Tzu, “All warfare is based on deception.”

The tale goes that White women were so desirable, White men treated them like precious porcelain figurines and would dare not defile them. They kept them locked up in the big house to keep them away from the big Black wild brutes they had working their fields. Yet Black folks were jumping the broom and tending to White folks kids, cooking, cleaning, farming… attempting to have a life familiar to them outside of slavery. And sadly, Black women were tending by force to the White men’s sexual needs. The mixed race female progeny of such arrangement became objects of desire, because they were aesthetically similar to White women but still property to do with what they pleased. Yet the severe psychological and spiritual damage done to Black peoples as a result of slavery resulted in us carrying many of these damaging dynamics into freedom.

Lighter skin Blacks, post slavery, got better opportunities that enabled them to become more financially secure. Black men of all hues sought after light skinned Black women both as status symbols and to have kids who were lighter than brown paper bags. This was a direct byproduct of slavery. Colorism is a form of racism that not only permeates Black life outside, but also inside the culture. This notion that lighter skin gained Black people any REAL favor is untrue. True favor is never rooted in deception or the increased oppression of your people.

2. If the forces are united, separate them.

Black peoples come in EVERY shade from 58-7 (Light peachy nude) 323-1 (Mahogany) on the Pantone scale. We have every curl pattern and type of hair that can grow from ones head. We range from genius to developmentally challenged. We are CEOs and we are homeless. We live in mansions and minivans. Our DNA translates into an extremely diverse set of aesthetics and genetics. Our lives are as heterogenous as any other group of people. Sadly, history has told us that those of us who fall on the lighter spectrum are more attractive and favored. A very painful history.

But instead of coming to the true impetus if this deceit, we take to infighting. Some people on the lighter end of the spectrum embrace these toxic ideas that they are somehow better, and cause trauma and pain for our darker skin brethren by perpetrating these lies. Who didn’t hear the multitude of stupid things kids would say to each other based on their skin color…

“Well you ain’t really Black anyway…”

“You so dark you look like a burnt piece of toast.”

And where do you think they heard that from? Adults praising or elevating light skin and putting down brown skin. Labeling those with light skin and long and fine hair as attractive, smarter, nicer, and those with coarse hair and brown skin as less attractive, less intelligent, and therefore more angry. But never exploring the true roots of this mindset, and it’s roots in the very racism we despised. Colorism is but an internal form of racism. Aesthetics had become a weapon against us, to paint a whole new picture of inferiority that somehow we took on to fight each other. Divide and conquer. “Talking bout good or bad hair…”

3. The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy.

You see, while racism was initially used to subjugate Black peoples into a position of powerlessness, it morphed into a way to shut down all the systems of pride and forward progress Black people were making. Kathleen Cleaver was a light as they came, Angela Davis, Huey Newton… but these were people knee deep in the freedom struggle for all Black people. But in the divide and conquer spirit, racists began to find ways to break up the Black Power, Civil Rights, and other freedom movements strengthening the Black community. Only light skinned Black faces were seen in movies, ads, anything that painted a picture of beauty. Brown skinned women with proud afros could be in a malt liquor add, but in a skin care add, the model would be light and long haired. White companies used their advertising power and White entertainment vehicles used their widespread appeal to brainwash us. This was just a corporate house (light skinned slaves would be cooks, help care for the children, etc in the slave owners home) versus field (darker skinned slaves were to work outside in the field) negro ideology. By simply using the same tools they always had, white supremacists were able, without saying much, to get us to turn on one another.

4. Practice dissimulation and you will succeed.

Racism isn’t going away, in fact, the more we take our natural place as leaders professionally, socially, and culturally, the worse it will get. Colorism is a powerful tool used by racists to cause divide within the culture that leads to confusion amongst us about who really is creating the discord. When Princess Tiana was brown with dark hair in The Princess and the Frog, assumed by Disney to most likely draw a Black audience, but lightens up her skin and gives her loose sandy brown curls in a more mainstream cartoon film, it simply further acknowledges that things like hair texture and skin color do impact the how America sees people of color. We cannot just accept the apology and not acknowledge that this is about more than cultural sensitivity or a black face on the marketing team. This is an example of a very real assault on us. How many times will they lighten our skin, remove our curves, make a rule about the kind of sportswear we use, before we realize it’s not a mistake at all.

When your President has been Black, your top athletes in damn near every sport are Black, our movies are winning the Oscars, our companies are thriving, our art is being coveted by some of the biggest design houses in the world, our names are appearing at the top of Fortune 500 rosters, and we are educating and performing at unheard of numbers… we are a threat to the powers that be that don’t appreciate diversity and inclusion in the world’s upper levels. White supremacy cannot exist without minority subjugation. So their “Sorry” is not often real, and we can’t be fooled by it. We have shut down whole businesses with our buying power and social influence… we can similarly insist that we all be included and valued and represented, across the color spectrum. But first we have to identify the racism and call it out, which effectively handicaps colorism. ” see if I care… good and bad hair!”

Light skinned privilege is real. It is also rooted in some of the most vile and disgusting truths about the way Black people in America and in the world have been subjugated, marginalized, and mistreated. It is typically experienced most strongly by Black women, because hair and skin color and standards of beauty are just generally not things Black men are judged based upon. But Black men are not immune nor unaffected. They are usually the main targets to the brain washing, based on the images they are fed through media. The privilege is really not a privilege at all… nothing is that is so deeply rooted in oppression. It is a weapon of war used against us. Until we accept this, we will continue to blame and lessen each other’s reality.

Being light skinned and having my heritage, my blackness, my “downness” questioned was not cool, and for many of us it was painful and isolating. Having your accomplishments lessened based on things that you had no control over, when you worked hard for those successes is hard. Even harder when your own people start to question you. Being brown skinned and being made to feel unattractive, lesser than and less desirable aesthetically, socially, romantically, or professionally caused damage to many of us that we still struggle to heal from. Being made to believe that who you are is somehow lessened based on your complexion, something some people seem to revere and others seem to hate, is a confusing and a detrimental emotional and spiritual space. We all owe each other more tenderness and acceptance of our reality. One is not more important or more traumatic than the other.

This privilege may be something some of us have, but it is definitely something many of us of us want no part of. Yet we are here in this space as a result of slavery, rape, racism, colorism, oppression, and degradation. The oppressed don’t want favor by the oppressor because she’s more like the oppressor in some extrinsic way. That has NOTHING to do with the oppressed. Yet, that same individual cannot knowingly and willingly take that favor to better her chances. My seat at the table must be properly earned.

I repeat, the “favored” oppressed is STILL OPRESSED! And the favor… is not really favor at all.

So stop it!

#teamrootingforeverybodyblack