Last night I was going through the blogs I read and came across this video, A Girl Like Me, on Trying to Follow. In this documentary, Kiri Davis (the director) interviewed 6 young black women about how they view themselves and how others view them based on their skin color. Kiri Davis did an excellent job making this film. The thoughtful statements of the women participating in the interview and the reconducting of Dr. Clark’s doll test together express how far America still has to come in ridding society of such deeply rooted lies.

We as human beings are wired in such a way as to have instinctual moral responses. The problem comes about when those instinctual moral responses become numbed or non-existent. In this case, the moral wrong committed is not limited to those who actively engage in racism, but includes those who fail both to acknowledge the wrong done and elicit thoughts and/or feelings of pain and outrage in response to it.

Below I have included a fairly lengthy excerpt from Barack Obama’s, Dreams From My Father. He is a man that is both thoughtful and wise; both are evidenced in his writing. With clarity Obama expresses himself and his journey to understand himself as a black man.

But in one corner I found a collection of Life magazines…[w]hen I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the subject of the story before reading the caption.

Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. One the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.

He must be terribly sick, I thought. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.

I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.

I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance.

I know that article was violent for me, an ambush attack. My mother had warned me about bigots–they were ignorant, uneducated people one should avoid.

But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone’s knowledge, not even my own. When I got home that night from the embassy library, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me. The alternative was no less frightening–that the adults around me lived in the midst of madness.

Barack Obama as a child in Indonesia as recorded in Dreams From My Father.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 8:49 pm and is filed under General, Media, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.