The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (30 page)

“Why’d he do that?” I asked her, noticing that her heart was heavy, her eyes tearing up as she spoke.

“He said I was too dark,” she said lowly.

“That can’t be right,” I protested on her behalf. “Did he actually tell you that?”

“Right to my face,” she replied, as if still in shock.

Although many black men are rarely that blunt, their actions speak just as harshly. The preference for light-skinned women finds painful precedent in black culture. It dates back to slavery when the lightest blacks—whose skin color was often the result of rape by white slave masters—were favored over their darker kin because they were closer in color and appearance to dominant society. Unfortunately, despite the challenge to the mythology of inherently superior white standards of beauty, there persists in black life the belief that light is preferable to dark. Music videos have historically presented light-skinned black women as the most desirable women. Even as browner women have more recently won space in the culture of representation within our race—a few of them, like Carla Campbell, Angela Basset, and Valerie Morris appear in videos, film, and on television news, respectively—there is an undeniable subordination of darker-skinned black women to lighter sisters in everyday life.

A bright, beautiful, and brown friend of mine—I’ll call her Renee—recently told me that she dated for a year a famous football star, a very dark brother, who told her that he almost didn’t ask her out because she was so dark. One of his gridiron colleagues, an equally chocolate brother, said within her earshot that Renee was not the kind of girl he usually dated since his other women had been much fairer. Renee also reported to me that an all-star NBA player told her that in order to fit in, he had to have the same car, same house, and same-looking woman as most of the other basketball players—meaning women who are very light-skinned or of mixed heritage, since these women are “hot” now.

Renee shared with me a painful e-mail missive from an intern who worked in her office that testifies to the persistence of virulent beliefs about skin color in black America. The young lady said that she and her friends felt that “as normal/ average looking young black women, we are no longer desirable.” She has “many friends who are dark-skinned and have natural hair who complain that they can never get attention from black men.” She also commented on what she and her friends have termed “hybrid chicks,” girls who are showcased and admired in music videos because they “are exotic looking, either half black and Asian or half Hispanic.”

What is remarkable is that such self-defeating prejudice persists despite the growing prominence in some circles of beautiful dark-skinned black women.
There is Ingrid Saunders Jones, the enormously gifted corporate executive who, from her perch as a senior vice president of Coca-Cola and head of its foundation, has funneled tens of millions of dollars into black America in aid of charitable, civic, and cultural causes. Ingrid is a glamorous woman with flawless, honeydipped ebony skin; healthy, sculpted eyebrows; soulful and sexy eyes; cascading, jet-black hair that is often pulled back into a ponytail; a blinding smile; perfectly lined lips; and a ’50s-style sensuality. There is Vanessa Bell Calloway, the intelligent and strikingly beautiful actress and co-host of the BET talk show
Oh Drama
. Vanessa is a shapely, buff sister with a dewy, espresso-brown complexion; clear, bright eyes; perfect white teeth; and a glittering sexuality—and a laugh as strong as her personality. There is Darlene Clark Hine, a brilliant Northwestern University historian—and former president of the Organization of American Historians—who has written several path-breaking books on black women’s life and history. Darlene is a deep, rich maple-colored beauty with entrancing features: big, expressive eyes; succulent cheeks; sexy, full lips; and milk-smooth skin, framed by a flow of layered, shining, silky, silvery hair. And among the younger generation, there is Aunjanue Ellis, a superbly talented actress with Ivy League credentials—she attended Brown University—and graduate training at New York University. Aunjanue is a smoky, sultry chocolate stunner whose megawatt smile, thick black tresses, chiseled cheeks, sweetly burnished flesh, alluring eyebrows, riveting dark eyes, luscious and life-affirming lips, svelte and taut physique, and comely legs make the gorgeous thespian a vision of soulful sensuality.

The continued preference for lighter sisters among blacks bears witness to psychic wounds that are not completely healed. The poisonous self-hatred that pours freely in the rejection of dark blackness is painful evidence of our unresolved racial anxieties about our true beauty and self-worth. Dark black women have often been cast aside and looked down upon because they embody the most visible connection to a fertile African heritage whose value remains suspect in our culture and nation.

As long as black men continue to spurn the root of our reality—summed up, perhaps, in the saying, “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice”—the longer we will be separated from the source of our survival. While we are wise not to envision our blackness in literal terms—it is not simply about skin, but about sensibility, aesthetics, culture, style, and the like—it would be foolish to deny that the debasing of blackness is often about the debasing of blacks in our skin, through our skin, because of our skin. While race is more cosmic than epidermis and flesh—encompassing politics, social structure, class, and region—our place in the world, and our reward and punishment too, are profoundly shaped by color.

As big a barrier to the flow of love between black men and women as the issues I’ve discussed are, perhaps none is more controversial, or as hurtful, as the rejection many black women experience when black men date and marry white women. As I lecture and preach across the country, black women of every station corner me, or ask me before an auditorium of hundreds, sometimes thousands, a
version of the question: “Why do so many brothers despise us and chase white women?”

Of course, I am always reluctant to speak for all black men, especially when it comes to something as personal and subjective—though obviously not without serious social overtones—as who one likes or loves. And many of my heroes—Quincy Jones and Sidney Poitier among them—married white women at a time when doing so bravely challenged the nation’s apartheid. In the ’60s and ’70s, interracial marriage, whether intended or not, represented a rejection of white supremacist values and indicated that love was a matter between individuals, not races. Few could miss the heroic gesture of loving across racial lines. Those who did often risked their reputations and social status while enduring cultural stigma. In short, it was apparent that interracial romance was unavoidably interpreted in political terms.

But if we are honest, interracial love has rarely, if ever, been simply about love. It has always borne political implications. From the very beginning of the black presence on American soil, stereotypes have distorted relations between the races, including those involving sex. Black males were brought to this nation in chains to be studs. Their virility was placed in the service of slavery. Black females were raped at will; their wombs became the largely unprotected domain of white male desire. Their sexuality was harnessed to perpetuate slavery through procreation. Later, of course, many more stereotypes of black men and women flourished, from the docile Uncle Tom, the fiery “field nigger,” the compliant “house nigger,” and the uppity buck, to the nurturing Mammy, the sarcastic sapphire, the promiscuous Jezebel, and now, in our day, the sex-crazed Lothario, the unrepentant rapist, the welfare queen, and the hoochie mama.

These stereotypes revolve largely around sex—how black people have it, under what conditions, for what reasons, how frequently, and if it can be read as a symptom of their debased nature and perverted character. Hence, these stereotypes often expressed the stunted social perceptions of black identity put forth by a white culture that refused to own up to its heavy hand in their creation.

Moreover, white society was ambivalent about black sexual identity—they wanted their blacks highly sexed to support slavery and white male pleasure. Otherwise, they wanted blacks to be constrained, even sexless if possible. Black men were feared and envied for their mythically large sexual organs. White male sexual desire was linked to strengthening patriarchal culture. As a result, white men sought to exploit black female eroticism, and to minimize sexual competition by outlawing black male sexual interactions with white women. The rise of lynching and castration are tied to the white male attempt to control the exaggerated threat of black male sexual desire. Long after the demise of such vicious social acts, the strong taboo on interracial sex prevails.

While black men were being constructed as studs, and black women as inherently lascivious—basically it was guilt by association, since black women must be hyper-sexed to be able to satisfy the sexual desire of their men—white women
were being projected as paragons of sexual virtue and placed on pedestals of purity. White female sexual desire, as much as possible, was segregated from public view. It was exclusively directed toward the bedroom of their white husbands, whose carousing outside the home—whether in the slave quarter or the whorehouse—was for the most part exempt from ethical scrutiny. There was minimal sexual contact between black men and white women during slavery. However, during Reconstruction there was a noticeable increase in these relations, although interracial marriages remained rare.

Antimiscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage between whites and people of color existed in forty states until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down these laws as unconstitutional in the landmark—and aptly named—
Loving v. Virginia
. Moreover, after emancipation, vicious sexual stereotypes served in part as a smoke screen to divert attention from how white men sought to prevent black men from enjoying the privileges of economic stability, middle-class status, and the freedom to raise their families. Still, the white woman defined the norm of beauty for the culture. She remained the prized erotic possession to be fought over by black and white men. Black women were largely excluded from this economy of desire, except in the crudest fashion.

This history must be kept in mind as we ponder the sexual fault lines in black America, and the tensions between black men and women around the perception that black men are aggressively marrying white women. Interracial marriage among black men and white women has risen dramatically in the last few years. Nearly 8 percent of all black men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four who were married in 1990 married nonblack women, compared to just 4 percent for white men in the same age cohort who married outside their race. Region, occupation, and education play a huge role in determining the interracial marriages of black men. In the Pacific Northwest, 32 percent of black men marry white women; in California, it’s 20 percent; in the Rocky Mountain states, it’s 30 percent; and in the New England states, 19 percent of black men marry white women. Military service hikes the numbers for black men marrying women outside their race, as 14 percent of black males in the military are married to nonblacks.

By contrast, only 7 percent of black men who didn’t serve in the military married nonblacks. More than 10 percent of black men who complete college marry outside of their race, compared to only 6 percent for black men who didn’t complete high school. And for black men who have attended graduate school, the number jumps to 13 percent who marry nonblack women. In fact, black men with graduate school experience are 30 percent more likely to marry outside their race than even black men with a college degree. Overall, more than 200,000 black men are married outside their race, mostly to white women.

On the surface, despite the soaring rates of intermarriage for black men, that number might not seem particularly disturbing, but from the perspective of educated black women, it represents a significant draining of the pool of available black men from which to choose a potential mate. As more black men go to prison,
die early from crime or from AIDS, are severely unemployed or underemployed, or choose an alternative sexual lifestyle, the numbers of compatible black men begin to significantly diminish for educated black women. And given the hostility that black men without higher education often harbor toward educated black women, the numbers of black men available for black women dwindle even more.

Young black women face a crisis in available black men unlike that faced by their grandmothers, who found marriageable black men in relatively plentiful numbers. The GI Bill altered the educational and employment landscape for black men of the postWorld War II generation. Black men who had been closed out of white-collar and professional jobs found new opportunities beyond the school teaching to which they had been formerly relegated. While black women, especially in the South, held many of the teaching jobs, blue-collar jobs were at the time a far better source of income, including waiting on tables in five-star restaurants and hotels, jobs that many college-educated black males took, along with serving as Pullman porters.

In the South’s segregated black schools, black men held most of the principals’ jobs. For those black men who didn’t go to college, especially since it was tough in the rigidly segregated job market for black men to reap benefit from higher education, they went to work immediately after high school in the jobs that collegeeducated men coveted as well. Under Jim Crow, the educated and uneducated alike met and mixed, and black women enjoyed a much larger pool of available and socially attractive black men from which to choose a mate.

Today, not only are the economic opportunities severely shrunk for black men who don’t obtain higher education, but the overwhelming majority of black students who attend college—80 percent of them—are matriculating in predominantly white schools. In contrast to black students of earlier generations who attended historically black colleges and universities, black students now have far greater access to white culture, tastes, opportunities, values, and goals. And they mix with white peers far more frequently than black students at black colleges and those black youth who end their education at high school.