Whatever lie was told has circulated (and there were some truly malicious ones), hurt many people. Whatever was said to caused such negative reaction raised the question of just how racially tolerant are the citizen of our city (especially in my neighborhood since this is where it began). Moreover, why would strangers believe lies about a woman, who the harassers did not and do not even know themselves?
Nevertheless, this phenomenon of trying to make a black woman feel and/or believe she is a lesser woman to a white woman is not new. It has occurred throughout the decades and had probably proven more effective during the years where black woman were in slavery and thought of as nothing more than property.
I have never believed such lies or myths, and I was very surprised when this type of racial profiling began and continued. I do not want to come off as if making a obvious joke, but this is the 21st century folks, and with the battles for minorities rights and the feminist movement of the past decades, I would sincerely think that the last thing any woman would want to do is put on an open display to degrade and/or diminished another woman in public regardless of her age or racial different.
However, it happens but I am not alone. Below are two excerpts in from an article written by De Clarke entitled, “Why is beauty on parade?” The first excerpt defines the charactrics was thought to be a woman. The second excerpt subtitled, “3 RACISM” looks at how racism have further encouraged the myth that being white and blond was only the true characteristics of a beauty woman.
I have also provided a link. If you should venture to the site to read the entire article you will discover that it sums up many of ideas that have been a great source of the racial injustices towards women of color. It also offers insight into the author own experiences. I high recommend reading the entire article.
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Defining Beauty
A beautiful woman, by the U.S. Standard of Beauty, should be Caucasian (but able to tan); she should preferably be blonde, and her hair should be long enough to provide a secondary fetish (after her body). She should be under 5’8” but definitely over 5’3”, and somewhere between the ages of 16 and 25. She should have no visible hair on her legs or thighs, or under her arms, or on her face (except for eyebrows, but even those may be plucked or waxed away). She should smile a lot. She should not frown, unless in cute exasperation (a la Doris Day); if she cries, she should do it silently and without spoiling her makeup. She should not look noticeably physically strong, though her legs and stomach must be in good muscle tone; she should be slim and long-legged. She should have large eyes, long lashes, abundant and shiny hair (only on her head), red lips, poreless skin, small white teeth, a small Anglo-Saxon nose, small clean ears, and no body odor at all. She should not sweat or exude vaginal secretions of any kind. Her hands should show no evidence of hard manual work.
If she conforms adequately to this list of requirements. she may be called “a doll.” She may regard it as a compliment.
“DREAM GIRL”—Title of a poster. Widely available in the late 60’s, showing a 10-or-12-year-old girl child with large adult breasts airbrushed onto her torso.
The last passage presented a confusing hodge-podge of requirements for beauty, but several main themes stand out.
3. RACISMAmerica is a land built on white colonial violence, the violence of white men against everyone else. Racism, in a land with this history, will underlie every social institution, saturate the culture. It is no coincidence that the American beauty is blonde--no more than that it is women who are supposed to be beautiful.
When Playboy magazine first ran pictures of Black women, readers wrote in large numbers, demanding that the editors "get those niggers out"--of the centerfold.
Blackness was (and in some sense probably still is: more later) considered of and by itself ugly in the American superculture. It was not long ago that drugstores in Black neighborhoods sold hair-straighteners, skin-lighteners, and so forth--mostly to Black women!--because beauty could only be white.
A number of factors mentioned previously enter into this situation. Certainly the use of Black people as slave labor precluded any association of Blackness with leisure that is a part of beauty. The history of dark/light value judgments dates back at least to the early Indo-European invasions of the ancient world. (The 'Indo-Europeans' are the warlike, patriarchal people we later know as the Greeks, Romans, and Brahman Indians. They were generally taller and lighter-skinned than the indigenous people they met in their invasions, whom they subsequently slaughtered and enslaved. Their earliest writings reflect their belief that tallness, lightness, and maleness weredivinely ordained to be better than smallness, darkness, and femaleness: they tended to destroy anyone who believed differently. We are still living with the damage.) The association of darkness and dirtiness, femaleness, animalism, and 'primitiveness' is that ancient. All those qualities are held as bad by patriarchal culture; they were the qualities of the losers and the enslaved--and, in a triumph of circular reasoning, they were good excuses to enslave and kill.
Darkness and ugliness are well established by the time of Shakespeare, when black-haired women were ridiculed in public and "fair" lady meant exactly that. The blackness of the enslaved African people in America was ugly because they were slaves; because blackness was bad; they were said to be "naturally" slaves because they were ugly and black; only bad witches were old and ugly, and God must have disliked them to make them that way . . .
