She was an eleven year old African American girl ostracized by her
small Midwestern World War II era community after she had been raped
and impregnated by her father. Demeaned for her dark skin and “ugly” features,
she became a repository for all of the community’s fears and
anxieties about the status of black people in Jim Crow America. Perhaps
no other book in contemporary American literature has captured the
ontology of black female childhood experience and imagination as devastatingly
as Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye. In the novel, Morrison’s
preteen female protagonists bear fierce witness to the psychological
disfigurements of racism, sexism, and segregation. They comment on
the mystery of adulthood and the savagery of being dehumanized as young
black girls in a culture that exalts the blue-eyed Barbie ideal. Speaking
from an era in which racial progress was equated with the enfranchisement
of black men, the female voices of The Bluest Eye quietly historicize
the trials of black women in apartheid America.
Yet, twenty-seven years later, Morrison’s portrayal is just
as searingly relevant as it was when it was published at the height
of the black power movement in the seventies. In its attention to the
role media (as represented by 1940s Dick and Jane grade school primers
and Hollywood film) play in shaping black adolescent female self-esteem,
Morrison’s novel almost anticipates the intersection between
the rise of 24/7 video and Internet media and the codification of racist/sexist
imagery.
During a recent screening of a video on girls’ perspectives
of media images in the high school class I work with, I was rudely
reawakened to the resonance of The Bluest Eye, and the intensity of
internalized racism and sexism among young black female students. Entitled
What a Girl Wants, the video was a relatively tame portrayal of the
effects of dominant images of sexuality in pop music videos and advertising
upon middle school and high school age young women. Focusing on such
overexposed mainstream artists as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera
and Mandy Moore, the video attempted to elicit candid reflections from
girls on the connection between these media images and their own sense
of self esteem, identity and future aspirations. In post video discussion
the girls in my class responded intelligently about the media’s
impact on normalizing casual sex for younger audiences. However, like
modern day Pecolas, some of the young women bought into the belief
that the booty shaking, thong wearing, weave sporting “vixens” of
hip hop media are symbols of authentic black culture. Most disturbingly,
when they commented on the sole African American girl who participated
in the interviews, they raised a hue and a cry about her “unfitness” as
an interview subject. The classes’ real objection was that the
girl was not conventionally attractive; her dark skin and short hair
making some of them refuse to identify with her as representing a genuine
African American female viewpoint. The discussion then devolved into
vigorous denials of their own black heritage. “I’m barely
black,” one brown-skinned young girl declared, while another
asked, “Why must we all be called African Americans even though
we’re mixed with different races in us?” Far from being
a relic of a bygone less enlightened era of black cultural identity,
the skin color caste system among blacks remains rampant yet largely
unaddressed by educators and youth advocates. These views are especially
devastating for young women, who are disproportionately affected by
the color regime in film, TV, video and print advertising, where depictions
of black couples typically feature a black woman who is several shades
lighter than her male counterpart.
Consequently, searching for media that deal with the authentic lived
experiences of young women of color is a frustrating enterprise. Although
there are a good crop of independent black female oriented websites
(sistahs.org, blackwomenshealth.com) that open up new vistas for authentic
expression, the Web continues to be catnip for an epidemic of adult
voyeurism that has transformed childhood and adolescence into sexualized
spectator sport. Young girls, sexualized at ever earlier ages, are
constantly confronted by the funhouse mirror of normative femininity—the
tighter and more revealing the clothes, the more provocative the sexual
behavior and innuendo, the more desirable, and hence feminine, a girl
is deemed to be.
This trend mirrors the way in which the sexuality of women of color
has become a global fetish object. Global images of black femininity
range from the suggestive symbols of black women with large Afros on
hip hop t-shirts from Japan to such stereotypical depictions of the
black woman as tacky prostitute trotted out in the hit film Borat.
In this much-lauded “satire” of Americana, an overweight
bleached blond black woman is parodied as the grotesque antithesis
of normative desirable white femininity (represented by the silicone
addicted Pamela Anderson). While the portrayal of this character, in
a vehicle rife with scatological sexual references and over the top
stunts, was framed as just another example of the movie’s irreverence,
it gamely traffics in the recycling of the Jezebel/Mammy figure (perfected
as of late by Queen Latifah) in contemporary mainstream media. A traveling
journalist from Kazakh, Borat’s fleeting encounter with the prostitute
is played for tragicomic relief as the antidote to his despair over
the revelation of Pamela Anderson’s decidedly unchaste behavior
in her pornographic wedding video. Later on in the film he commits
the ultimate racial/social faux pas when he brings the woman to a society
dinner at a Southern belle’s home and is swiftly ejected. He
repairs to a local country and western dive where his lust interest
climbs onto a mechanical bull and displays her “assets.” This
interlude completes the Kazahk innocent’s voyage into the American
heart of darkness, the travelogue of American blackness mapped through
illicit sex, buffoonery and idleness. When Borat takes his paramour
back to his native country as his wife at the end of the film, she
fits in perfectly with the cultural pathology and primitive folkways
of this Eastern European backwater.
It is not surprising that these images have gone unaddressed by many
mainstream and so-called progressive critics, who’ve scrambled
to out-drool one another hailing the film’s comic genius. Yet
the ecstatic embrace of the film, and, by extension, its indictment
of the black image (as a less than subtle caveat on cultural diversity
and the vaunted freedoms of America), underscores how the media regime
utilizes race and gender as powerful vehicles for repressive public
policies. Increasing rates of STD and HIV/AIDS infection, the absence
of culturally relevant sex education or the overemphasis on abstinence-only
sex education, coupled with the cancerous global reach of misogynistic
hip hop, have brought caricatures of black femininity back to the international
fore as symptoms of American dysfunctionality. It is no wonder then
that many middle and high school age black women struggle to achieve
self worth and agency in their lives. The challenge for socially conscious
educators and adults is to put the same emphasis on black female image
formation as for black male image formation, and to help young women
develop media literacy to fight back against the insidious assumptions
that the global media regime imposes on their lives.
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