Dolls, Hair and White Power

          Here are two examples of white power, separated by sixty years and three thousand miles.          

       In 1950 Kenneth and Mamie Clark wrote a report for the White House. When shown identical white and black dolls, African American children often preferred the white to the black doll. Even more ominously, when allowed to give themselves a color, many of the darker skinned children used a white or a yellow crayon. The Clarks’ correctly concluded that “prejudice, discrimination and segregation” caused the African American youngsters to develop a sense of inferiority and self hatred.”

      In 2007, Professor Shirley Tate provided this evidence from London. In rejecting white standards of beauty, many dark skinned women adopted a new aesthetics. Especially when it came to hair, a clear binary set the tone; natural was appropriate and attractive, unnatural (e.g. wigs, hair straightening) was ugly and rejected. Working with “mixed race” women Professor Tate discovered the following. Some men and women hated the new antiracist aesthetic; if the women “wore their hair out”, others put cigarette butts and ashes in their coiffure.

    “Can you imagine what it must have been like to feel such hatred?” Professor Tate tried but she also had problems with this additional account. Having adopted the new aesthetic, the young women criticized themselves; try as they might, their hair looked too white. In response, a boyfriend sent a card with a photo of a “girl with long hair and brown skin with a red rose in her hair.” The young woman looked at the photo in a “negative way” even though she knew that her boyfriend wanted to show her what she actually looked like. Finally, the young woman looked at the photo again and discovered that he was right. “But I was so tied up in it that I didn’t see the fact that the girl looked like me. I just looked at the fact that she had light skin and long curly hair and rejected it because that was the image on it. And I thought is this how we get screwed up?”

      You bet it is. And even though this account comes from England, my students –and the literature on “mixed race” Americans- indicate that the same aesthetic and identity problems exist in the United States. After sixty years white people still sit on the throne because of this seeming paradox: Even when you reject the culture, you are still determined by it.  

       When the Clarks did their research white power operated with no revolutionary resistance. Alternative images of African Americans were few and far between; in the fifties, the choices on American television ranged from Beulah to Buckwheat. The Civil Rights Movement certainly got people thinking and in the sixties Black Power ushered in an anti-racist aesthetic rooted in the natural look. Angela Davis arguably personified the new standard but, despite the assertion that “black is beautiful”, the white/black dichotomy still acted like a prison cell. Professor Tate correctly stresses that it is an “antiracist aesthetic”; thus, the new positive is rooted in the hated negative and, even when they are told to go to hell, white people still run the aesthetic show.

      So called “mixed race” Americans and British are especially vulnerable because, given their double ancestry, they are forever caught in the middle. In the case of the young women interviewed by Professor Tate, they opted for an ideal they could never achieve. They wanted to look black so they used white people as the ultimate negative. Meanwhile, since they looked somewhat white, they learned to demean themselves and, in a terrible repetition of history, they replicated the findings of the Clarks, with this difference. Instead of a doll, the young woman looked at a photo of someone who looked like her and disliked what she saw. She disliked herself.

        That’s perverse. Nobody wins except white power. And it is a two nation tragedy because, as the hair example suggests, we are walking backwards through history. The only viable alternative is to follow the advice of Debra Dickerson, in The End of Blackness. We need to move beyond race and the white/black dichotomy because, whether as a positive or a negative, whites remain “at the center of the black agenda-setting”.

    To some this is a “maddening” outcome. As Ms. Dickerson notes, “if blacks accept it, then whites will have gotten away with their crimes.” Not necessarily. Suppose that, for example, high school and university students used the Internet to begin an extended national debate about the identity consequences of the dichotomy. Suppose we were able to show that, in 2008, the dichotomy still produces, as in 1950, the venom that destroys self esteem. Then, instead of whites getting away with anything, “everyone” would understand that the dichotomy is the longest lasting ideological consequence of slavery. We would move toward a transracial world by reaching an informed and shared consensus about the persisting and pernicious power of the white/black dichotomy.

     It will be painful. But it is the only way out of the prison created by the dichotomy. And it is the only way to make certain that a young “multiracial” woman never again gets screwed up by the terrible consequences of “racial” beliefs and values.

   (Professor Tate’s excellent essay appears in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, March 2007)