Don't Play in the Sun - Marita Golden

Don't Play in the Sun by Marita Golden

I have not even finished this book and would like to recommend it on the forum. I have been eyeing it, on this website, for two years and finally! Thank you! Light, good reflections, a meditation even, sit by the bus stop and smiling, saying, hmm, hmm. A classmate, a white guys says, why do you always read these sad books, he means black as well, because he has asked the question using the description black previously (so I don't know why he needs to ask again, my answer won't change). I say, why do you always read all these white books? This dichotomy, disparity...

Here is an excerpt. Don't feel like she is talking about the Black Power movement, feel like last week, yesterday.

'''I was angry, and my parents and relatives were afraid. I was angry at my mother for her colorist warnings. At all the teachers I'd had who taught me from books that never showed my face. At white people and the world they seemed to dominate and control. I was angry, but inside I was fragile and wanted more than anything for my parents, my elders, and my family to embrace and accept the new me.

But they were afraid. Very afraid. It was as though by saying that Black was beautiful I had violated a law of nature. And in a way I had. We were tunring the world and all its conventional assumptions upside down. At some point in our racial past we knew in our blackness we were merely and gloriously human. In our blackness we were children of God. In our blackness we were no more and no less than anyone else. But slavery, peonage, lynchings, and Jim Crow segregation had imposed the most abiding and wrenching amnesia. For a long and quite lonely time, I was an outsider in my family because I adhered to a new gospel.

And yet because we never addressed or dared to talk about the insidious ways in which colourism had divided and conquered us, even while focusing on the sins of 'The Man' and 'The System' and 'White Racism', my generation squandered a precious, perfect moment that could have allowed us to move from a theorectical assertion that Black is Beautiful, to the first neccessary, halting acceptance that it really is beautiful in fact. That black skin possesses a radiance and a depth that is regal and stunning. That full lips are just that, full lips. They are not watermelon or banana lips or any of the racist sterotypes propagated and encouraged by the larger culture even by Black people. They are just lips! And that a broad nose is a nose. A nose that fits our phenotype. White people's lips don't speak pearls of wisdom because they are thin. They are body parts. Anatomy. But the activists of my generation, for all of our considerable and laudable courage, failed to divest these images of their cultural definitions. Because then we would have had to look into our own tattered souls and trembling hearts and see how little love we possessed for ourselves. But until we fessed up to the self-hatred rooted in colorism, we would always be held hostage to it. The Black community was a huge dysfunctional family made up of thousands of dysfunctional families, most of whom were in deep denial about the persistance of the color comples even in the age of 'Black is Beautiful'. Oh, if just saying it made it so. And so in the sixties we rattled the bars on the cage. We saw the keys to the door. But we were content to remain inside...''

- M -