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oreo barbie: black edition
I was never allowed to have a Barbie doll. Of course that just made me want one even more. I didn’t even like them that much, but EVERYBODY had them. Everybody, but me. So I felt left out and/or deprived of something. Since this was my mother’s rule, I would beg any and everyone else that I lived with or visited to let me have one and keep it at their house. No one acquiesced. My mom always said she would not allow it was because those dolls were not only racist, but sexist. If I recall correctly, her main issue was that the black barbies were just dyed white barbies. That’s one of the main points of Ann DuCille’s Barbie post. Today I am proud to have never owned a Barbie. Thanks, Mom.
Apparently the “regular” version sold so well they decided to make this one.
The doll was eventually recalled.
Did Mattel intentionally produce a doll that embodied a well-known insult in the Black community? If they didn’t (and let’s just go with that theory), it means that no one at Mattel involved in the production of this doll had the cultural competence to notice the problem. This points to both (1) white privilege and the ease with which white people can be ignorant of non-white cultures and (2) a lack of diversity on the Mattel team. Less employee homogeneity might have saved Mattel both face and money in this instance. Diversity, then, is often good business.
For more on Barbie and racial politics, see this post inspired by Ann DuCille. Reblogged
speaking of dr. seuss
10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss Stories
3. If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, is the first recorded instance of the word “nerd.”
5. Green Eggs and Ham. Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss’ editor, bet him that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or less. The Cat in the Hat was pretty simple, after all, and it used 225 words. Not one to back down from a challenge, Mr. Geisel started writing and came up with Green Eggs and Ham – which uses exactly 50 words. The 50 words, by the way, are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.
prom night in mississippi
ONE TOWN. TWO PROMS.
UNTIL NOW.
1954
The U.S. Supreme Court orders the integration of all segregated schools in America, including all their events.
1970
The town of Charleston, Mississippi, finally allows black students into their one high school. White parents refuse to integrate the school Graduation Dance, starting a tradition of separate, parent-organized White Proms and Black Proms.
2008
Change happens.
Oh. My. Goodness. Guys did you see this!? Last night was the premiere of the HBO documentary Prom Night in Mississippi. It was just so darn good. One of my favorite documentaries ever! In case you haven’t heard, the town of Charleston, MS had been holding two separate, segregated proms since the schools integrated in 1970. Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the prom in 2007 if they would just hold one for all of the students. His offer was declined. He tried again in 2008 and his offer was accepted. The film exposes the climate of race relations in Mississippi and makes clear that this up and coming generation must make a conscious choice to break the cycle of division.
I have long been a fan of Morgan Freeman. Probably since the first time I saw the movie Glory. Then he sealed the deal with Robin Hood and Shawshank. Anyway, I was inspired by the way he spoke to the students and handled the adults on the school board, but the most poignant Morgan moment for me was when he said “If I go around hating you because you have blond hair and blue eyes, I’m doomed. You’re fine, but I’m doomed.” I believe that with all my heart. I’m always saying that this racism thing is a double edged sword. On the surface it may seem like it’s just those being discriminated against who are being hurt by it, but I’ve always felt that most of the damage is done to the discriminator. I just loved hearing him say that.
There is a section of the film where the students are so openly talking about the ways they’ve been taught to be racist and pondering why this could be. Some of the white kids come to the conclusion that it must be that their people don’t want mixed kids in their family. That’s why the adults are so afraid of an integrated prom. We’re told that one parent said, “I don’t want no n****r grinding up on my daughter. I won’t have no mixed kids in this family.” The fact that people think this way is certainly not news to me. It’s my history. I know it well. And yet, I was so uncomfortable hearing it spoken aloud. Like kinda squirmy.
There is one interracial couple in the film. Heck, there is probably one interracial couple in the whole town, and they happen to be students at the school. They do not hold hands in public. They have never been on a date because her father, who insists that he is not racist, will not allow it. He hasn’t “whooped her or nothin”, but he grounded her and took her phone away. To his dismay she overcame it all and is still dating Jeremy. They got the most applause during the senior walk at the prom.
There are so many things I want to relay, but really I think you should just see the film. Please.
more obama love
As someone who is consistently accused of either holding negative ideas about what being black is and/or trying to be white, I cannot tell you just how much gratification I got out of reading President Obama’s response to the reactions to his recent NAACP 100th Anniversary speech. In this Washington Post interview with Eugene Robinson he explains that though he was speaking directly to a group of affluent, successful, educated African Americans who are dedicated to raising their children to be the same that one should not
“underestimate the degree to which a speech like the one I gave yesterday gets magnified throughout the African American community,” Obama told me in the Oval Office, where a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. surveys the room in silent admonition. “Folks on Friday go in and get their hair cut, they’re getting ready for the weekend, they’re sitting in the barber’s chair, and somebody said, ‘Did you see what Obama said yesterday?’ It sparks a conversation. . . . And part of what my goal is here is to make sure that I’m giving a lot of folks permission to talk about things that maybe they’ve talked about around the kitchen table but don’t get fully aired in public.”
I am no Obama, but I must admit that I feel like this is exactly what I’m trying to do. Get everyone talking about this uncomfortable stuff in ways that almost seem too honest because we’re just not used to having the conversation. I have been accused of airing “our” dirty laundry. This always leaves me thinking, “Why not? Dirty laundry just creates stagnant funk. Let’s air it out and move on.”
This next bit really spoke to me as well. Whenever I highlight the widely accepted generalizations of blackness that tend to be negative and also tend to inform the definitions of blackness held by both whites and blacks, I am hoping that by looking back and seeing where these ideas came from and how they seeped into our consciousness that they will be exposed for the ridiculous, limiting notions they are and then will be dispelled. I’m never saying “that is what blackness is and we ‘mulattoes’ are not like that.” I just mean that there are many ways to be black. Mainly just being born black and then living your life as you. Whoever that turns out to be. Whoever you turn out to emulate, hang out with, enjoy the music, company, writings of. I think we’re American first. And yes being black in America is still not the same as being white in America. We are still on the outside. But, in my opinion, the tragedy lies in thinking that’s where one belongs and making a conscious choice to stay on the outside. Perhaps in order to reject the mainstream as they have rejected us. But with all of it’s faults, this country has a lot to offer a life. Sometimes I think people are so busy being “black” (or whatever one has been taught to believe should infom their identity) that they miss out on some of the riches of simply being American.
“One of the ways that I think that the civil rights movement . . . weakened itself was by enforcing a single way of being black — being authentically black. And, as a consequence, there were a whole bunch of young black people — and I fell prey to this for a time when I was a teenager — who thought that if you were really ‘down’ you had to be a certain way. And oftentimes that was anti-something. You defined yourself by being against things as opposed to what you were for. And I think now young people realize, you know what, being African American can mean a whole range of things. There’s a whole bunch of possibilities out there for how you want to live your life, what values you want to express, who you choose to interact with.”
…Said Obama: “I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it’s like to be on the outside.
President Obama, I just love you and I promise that by focusing on my “unique experience” I am not detaching from the larger struggle. K?
the house at the end of the road
Although I am reading two books similar to this right now, I am so eager to jump into this one. My “mulatto” google alert alerted me to this review. I found myself fascinated by the first two paragraphs…
The Family That Rejected Jim Crow
By Martha A. Sandweiss
The Story of Three Generations of An Interracial Family in the American South
By W. Ralph Eubanks
Smithsonian. 206 pp. $26.99
W. Ralph Eubanks’s family memoir tells a double story, one about the past and the other about the author’s efforts to uncover it. This has become a familiar kind of literature, the search for family roots that becomes a search for one’s own identity. But Eubanks has an unusual story to tell. His maternal grandparents, Jim and Edna Richardson, lived on a remote rural road in a black community in the now deserted town of Prestwick, Ala. According to family stories, they married in 1914 and by 1929 had seven children. Jim was a white man, a “boisterous adventurer” and bootlegger who ran a logging business. Edna’s racial heritage was mixed, but she thought of herself as black. In Jim Crow Alabama, where the courts had repeatedly upheld the state constitution’s ban on interracial marriages, the Richardsons constituted an unusual sort of family, and they defied the social rules that governed the segregated South. After Edna died in 1937, Jim remained in Prestwick with his light-skinned children. They could have moved away to start life anew as a “white” family. After all, Eubanks says, the children were so fair that a federal census agent once categorized them as “white.” But the family “made a conscious choice to identify as black people, in spite of skin color and features that would have allowed them to move seamlessly into the white world.”
Eubanks sees this act as both radical and heroic. As a black man married to a white woman, he finds in his grandparents’ lives valuable lessons for his own. “Sometimes it even felt as if they had forged a path for the life my wife and I shared, occasionally guiding us on our way.” He thus crafts a progressive tale of social improvement, with his grandparents’ and parents’ lives in the Jim Crow South paving the way for his own youth during the civil rights era and eventually leading to his 11-year-old daughter’s vision of a world “where race matters less and justice and our common humanity matter more.”
mulatto diaries 