| re: Question re: Once On This Island revival - a white Daniel? | |
| Posted by: ntjvy 09:06 pm EST 02/07/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Question re: Once On This Island revival - a white Daniel? - Chazwaza 08:38 pm EST 02/07/18 | |
|
|
|
| I think there's some faulty thinking in this, but I think that the first paragraph is the root of our different perspectives. I could not disagree more. In the context of race relations today, it most certainly is not the color that is visible to the naked eye that matters in terms of oppression. I'm actually a little floored by that statement and I think that you are really simplifying the issue. I'm having a really hard time with the idea that you think that racism today is based on skin tone, and trying to figure out how to best communicate it. . . Racism isn't something that is experienced only on a one-on-one basis. It is so much bigger than the "n" word and being followed around in stores and even than police brutality. Institutional racism is a real thing. It is generational and the effects of it pass down generations. (And I might add also, that there are elements of race that go beyond skin tone, including hair texture and facial features. An albino black individual is often still recognizable black, but I digress.) Racism isn't just about discrimination in a personal sense. It's about access to education, wealth, economic opportunity, housing, job opportunities etc and those things are often based upon your parents access and their parents access. In a sense, it's inherited and will continue to be until the government takes *effective* action in leveling the playing field that literally centuries of direct oppression have created and not just eliminating the technicalities that allowed for the oppression. Primary black communities in our country have less access to these things that I metnion than primary white communities (there are outliers, always outliers). It doesn't matter how light skinned a person is, if they haven't had access to these things, due to their race, not their skin color, but their race, than they are experiencing racism. This isn't unusual. Access was denied to the suburbs for black folks for decades through redlining and housing discrimination creating segregated living conditions. It's not by chance that primarily black neighborhoods, that were created due to this discrimination, have lesser quality schools. Doesn't matter what your pigmentation is, if you are forced into a lower quality school because you live in a "black" neighborhood because that's where your family has roots because they were marginalized to it through redlining, you're experiencing racism. If you're very light but you have a "black sounding" name, you're less likely to get called in for a job interview. There are a million examples of this. Of course there's also the flip side if positive culture that can be inherited regardless of your pigmentation also. And what I'm saying is NO, we should not have to look up Powell's background in order to understand. Perhaps we can let his representation of the character, and Arden's choice of it, and the book, guide us into reconsidering our own limited thinking around race, class and colorism. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: Question re: Once On This Island revival - a white Daniel? - Chazwaza 08:38 pm EST 02/07/18 |
| Next: | re: Question re: Once On This Island revival - a white Daniel? - Chazwaza 09:21 pm EST 02/07/18 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.010105 seconds.