On ‘Jackson Five Nostrils,’ Creole vs. ‘Negro’ and Beefing Over Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2016-02-12 19:22Z by Steven

On ‘Jackson Five Nostrils,’ Creole vs. ‘Negro’ and Beefing Over Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’

ColorLines
2016-02-08

Yaba Blay, Dan Blue Endowed Chair & Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
North Carolina Central University, Durham, North Carolina

As you know, the video for Beyoncé Knowles’ “Formation” does the most, from invoking police violence, to flashing back to Hurricane Katrina, to celebrating Blue Ivy’s adorable afro. Here, Yaba Blay, a dark-skinned, New Orleans-bred scholar who researches skin color and identity politics, gets into a topic we’ve been avoiding: the message Beyoncé is sending about complexion and worth.

I was born and raised in New Awlins and never miss the opportunity to remind folks of that. So when Beyoncé’s video for “Formation” dropped on Saturday, I, like the majority of my homegirls, was hype.

I wasn’t excited because I’m a certified Beyoncé stan, because the video is visually stunning, or because this seemed to be the Blackest iteration of Beyoncé yet. I was hype because she seemed to be reppin’ New Awlins hard, and not in a tepid “I heart N.O.” kind of way, but more in line with our playfully defiant brand of Blackness. That she unleashed the video during Mardi Gras weekend? It just couldn’t get any better!

Until it got worse…

…I cheer Bey on as she sings, “I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.” But I cringe when I hear her chant, “You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bamma about her Alabama-born dad and her mom from Louisiana. This is the same reason I cringed at the L’Oreal ad that identified Beyonce as African-American, Native American and French and why I don’t appreciate her largely unknown song “Creole.”

Having grown up black-Black (read: dark-skinned) in colorstruck New Awlins, hearing someone, particularly a woman, make a distinction between Creole and “Negro” is deeply triggering. This isn’t just for me but for many New Orleanians.

For generations, Creoles—people descended from a cultural/racial mixture of African, French, Spanish and/or Native American people—have distinguished themselves racially from “regular Negroes.” In New Orleans, phenotype—namely “pretty color and good hair”—translates to (relative) power…

Read the entire article here.

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Join in the #LittleWhiteLie Twitter Chat with Filmmaker @laceyschwartz & More!

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2015-06-16 18:12Z by Steven

Join in the #LittleWhiteLie Twitter Chat with Filmmaker @laceyschwartz & More!

#LittleWhiteLie, @lwlfilm
2015-06-16, 20:00 EDT (2015-06-17, 00:00Z)

An online discussion on Race, Identity and “Little White Lies”

Lacey Schwartz, Filmmaker (Little White Lie)
Brooklyn, New York

Yaba Blay, Author and Professor
(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Collier Meyerson, Race & Politics Reporter
Fusion

Michelle Materre, Filmmaker and Professor
The New School, New York, New York

Jamil Smith, Senior Editor
The New Republic

For more information, click here.

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The Remix: Dr. Yaba Blay on Colorism, Kendrick Lamar & Trevor Noah

Posted in Audio on 2015-04-10 19:01Z by Steven

The Remix: Dr. Yaba Blay on Colorism, Kendrick Lamar & Trevor Noah

The Remix with Dr. James Peterson
WHYY 90.9 FM
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2015-04-01

James Braxton Peterson, Host and Associate professor of English
Lehigh University, Lehigh, Pennsylvania

Comedy Central has named South African comedian Trevor Noah to helm “The Daily Show” when John Stewart departs later this year. It took slightly less than 24 hours for Noah to come under attack for remarks he made on Twitter that some perceived as anti-semitic and misogynistic. We can’t predict how Noah will weather the controversy, but Dr. James Peterson says he’s not surprised, because comics seem to consistently run into trouble for offensive remarks on Twitter.

“The Remix” is more interested in the fact that Comedy Central has appointed two men of color to lead their two most popular time slots (Larry Wilmore’sThe Nightly Show” replaced “The Colbert Report“) and the ways that might affect the nation’s daily consumption of news and news satire.

Peterson welcomes scholar, teacher and activist Dr. Yaba Blay to “The Remix” to discuss colorism, segregation within the African-American community, and cultural expressions of whiteness. The two also take a look at Blay’s book, “(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race,” and her initiation into the Yoruba religion.

After a brief hiatus, “Props” is back, and this time, Kendrick Lamar gets some praise for taking risks on his new album “To Pimp a Butterfly.”

Listen to the episode here.

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Fifteen Projects Selected for Tribeca Film Institute All Access Grants

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Arts, Media Archive, United States on 2015-03-22 20:53Z by Steven

Fifteen Projects Selected for Tribeca Film Institute All Access Grants

Filmaker
2015-03-19

Scott Macaulay, Editor-in-chief

Fifteen works — scripted, documentary and interactive — were selected today for the Tribeca Film Institute‘s All Access program, which offers grant monies and other non-monetary support to projects by creators from statistically underrepresented communities. The projects were chosen from a submission pool of 710 entries. In addition to the 15 projects, two filmmakers from the LGBT community were chosen to take part in TFI Network Market, a one-on-one industry meeting forum, with their feature films. They are Ingrid Jungermann, a 25 New Face appearing with her project Women Who Kill, and Hernando Bansuelo, with Martinez, CA.

The complete list of selected projects, from the press release, is below…

So Young So Pretty So White: Directed by Chanelle Aponte Pearson and Terence Nance; produced by Yaba Blay and Michelle Serieux. Weaving together the lives of several compelling men and women from across the globe, the film is a window into the world of skin bleaching, unveiling what drives people to lighten their skin and the complex factors that make it difficult to stop…

Read the entire article here.

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A Dialogue on Institutional Colorism and Moving Toward Healing with Dr. Yaba Blay

Posted in Articles, Audio, Interviews, Media Archive, Social Science, United States, Women on 2015-01-29 16:16Z by Steven

A Dialogue on Institutional Colorism and Moving Toward Healing with Dr. Yaba Blay

For Harriet
2015-01-28

Kimberly Foster, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher

For Harriet is nearly five years old, and I’ve learned there are a few topics that are sure to spark contentious debate. Colorism is one of them. Discussions on colorism provoke strong feelings in Black women, in particular, and it seems that rarely do the conversation’s participants walk away with a deeper understanding of the institutional consequences of colorism or the ways we can move forward in combatting them.

What Bill Duke’s Light Girls documentary sorely missed was the voice of a Black woman colorism scholar, so I felt compelled to speak with Dr. Yaba Blay about how we can have a more effective conversation on colorism in our attempts to heal. Dr. Blay is currently co-director and assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University. She’s the artistic director and producer of the (1)ne Drop Project, and she was a consulting producer for CNN’s Black in America 5.

Read her phenomenal book, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Listen to the interview and read the transcript here.

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Michael Brown and the deadly effects of colorism

Posted in Articles, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-11-29 00:37Z by Steven

Michael Brown and the deadly effects of colorism

Newsworks: WHYY News
The Philadelphia Experiment
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2014-10-30

Solomon Jones

The outcry triggered by the killings of unarmed men by police officers — from Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Mo., to the choking death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY — has largely focused on the victims’ skin color.

But little has been said about the fact that the men killed by police are not just African American. They are often dark skinned. That deep, ebony complexion, and all that it symbolizes, is significant, said Dr. Yaba Blay, co-director and assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University.

For dark-skinned black men, Blay said, “The unquestionable state of their blackness invokes fear in others. We haven’t seen racially ambiguous men gunned down by police.”

Complex prejudice

Such violence is just one consequence of what academics call colorism — the prejudging of others based on complexion…

Read the entire article here.

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11-2 Insight Dr. Yaba Blay Author of One Drop – Shifting the Lens on Race

Posted in Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2014-11-28 04:50Z by Steven

11-2 Insight Dr. Yaba Blay Author of One Drop – Shifting the Lens on Race

Power 99FM, WUSL-FM
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2014-10-30

Loraine Ballard Morill, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Teaching Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dr. Yaba Blay author of (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race talks about the changing definition of race and whether it matters.

Download the interview here.

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One Drop: Drexel professor’s new book explores what determines blackness

Posted in Articles, Arts, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-10-24 17:59Z by Steven

One Drop: Drexel professor’s new book explores what determines blackness

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2013-11-26

UNLESS YOU want an earful, don’t get Drexel University professor Yaba Blay talking about colorism. She sees examples of discrimination based on skin color everywhere – from drug stores that stock skin-bleaching creams to the online chatter that erupts when photos surface of Beyonce and Jay Z’s daughter, Blue Ivy.

“[People say], why doesn’t Beyonce comb that baby’s hair?” Blay said. “You would rather put an entire pack of barrettes on that baby’s hair?”

“I hate that,” I murmured.

“I hate it more,” she shot back. “[People] expect her to look like her mama. . . . She’s 2.”

And don’t bring up the subject of Kanye West, who once famously referred to biracial women as “mutts.”

“Kanye’s choosing Kim [Kardashian] is not about Kim. It’s about Kanye,” said Blay, author of a new book called (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. “He’s obsessed with her. It has to do with what her being on his arm says about him.”

Yeah, Blay went there.

And, let me tell you, the codirector of the Africana Studies program doesn’t hold back in that new book of hers, either. It deals with America’s biggest third-rail issue: race. That subject hasn’t gotten any less explosive since America elected its first black president.

The book is provocative right from its title, taken from the slavery-era notion that if you had one drop of black blood, you were considered black.

Plus, here’s a darker-hued woman writing about the racial experiences of lighter-skinned people, many of whom identify as black or mixed race. That’s an incredibly touchy topic among some black folk because of historical social stratification based on skin color that grants higher status to lighter-hued blacks.

The subject was explored in depth in a documentary called “Dark Girls” that aired recently on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

(1)ne Drop is sort of the reverse…

Read the entire article here.

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America’s sex and race failure: Why Raven-Symone and an Ohio couple are struggling

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-10-10 18:07Z by Steven

America’s sex and race failure: Why Raven-Symone and an Ohio couple are struggling

Salon
2014-10-08

Brittney Cooper, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

How a TV star shunning labels, and a lesbian couple with a Black baby illustrate the fight to assert one’s humanity

This week, iconic Cosby (grand)kid Raven-Symoné caught up with Oprah, telling her in an interview: “I don’t want to be labeled gay… I’m a human who loves other humans. …I’m American not African American.  I don’t know what country I’m from in Africa, but I do know I have roots in Louisiana. I’m an American, and that’s a colorless person.” It would be tempting to frame these recent remarks on race and gay identity from the Cosby Show and Disney star as just more ideal and myopic millennial musings on race. But I think her comments tell us something about the operations of contemporary notions of the “human” that are worth unpacking.

Let me begin by saying that using one’s Louisiana roots is perhaps the worst place to begin in an argument about how the term “American” is a “color-less” one. Both sides of my family have lived in Louisiana since the earliest census records I could find. That census, the 1870 census was the first to record the names of all the black people that had been freed within the last decade. With great care, citizens were designated with a “C,” “M,” or “W,” for “colored,” “mulatto” and “white” respectively. Well into the late 20th century, my grandmother referred to Black people as colored.

Certainly, Raven-Symoné’s arguments bear the trace of the postracial rhetoric so prominent among certain (though not all) segments of millennials.  But her desire to not acknowledge or carry the “African” designation in “African-American” is far from new. To be clear, many Black people who are Americans, are not “African American” in the sense that we mean that term today, namely as native born Black people. Voluntary rather than forced migrations of diasporic Black people from the Caribbean and from West Africa have been a characteristic of the U.S. Black population since the early 20th century.  The side eye I’m giving to Raven-Symoné is not about a desire to demand that all Black people in the U.S. take on the moniker “African American,” but rather about the fact that her framing suggests that it is the connection of Africa to blackness that has her wanting to disavow a hyphenated identity…

…Among the many things I find troubling in her statement is the idea that America is color-less. It is a society built on a foundational color schema in which black skin is figured as the condition for unfreedom and white skin as the condition for freedom. Louisiana itself had a notoriously restrictive definition of the one drop rule as Dr. Yaba Blay discusses in her book “One-Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race,” Louisiana law classified all people with “one-thirty-second or less” of Negro blood would be “deemed, described, or designated” officially as ‘colored, ‘mulatto,’ ‘black,’ ‘negro,’ ‘griffe,’ “Afro-American,’ ‘quadroon,’ ‘mestizo,” ‘colored person,’ or ‘person of color.’ Well into the 1980s, i.e. well into Raven Symoné’s lifetime, this law was used to designate putatively white people as black…

…This kind of rhetorical move is also salient coming on the heels of recent reports of an Ohio lesbian couple opting to sue their sperm bank for erroneously giving them black donor sperm.  I get suing for negligence and shoddy service. But for this queer couple, the presence of their Black daughter disrupts their ability to exist comfortably in the space of whiteness that defines their community, a community that they admit is deeply homophobic. Having chosen to be a queer family in the midst of a heteronormative white universe in Ohio, their Black child has now disrupted their access to white power and privilege. This biracial black girl is growing up with distraught, devastated queer parents who love her despite her blackness. Having internalized antiblackness, they note their discomfort with taking her to a black neighborhood for haircuts and their fear of the racist reprisal of neighbors and family members…

Read the entire article here.

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Indie Groundbreaking Book: (1)ne Drop

Posted in Articles, Arts, Book/Video Reviews, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-10-07 18:12Z by Steven

Indie Groundbreaking Book: (1)ne Drop

Independent Publisher
October 2014

Craig Manning
Western Michigan University

Landmark Photo Essay Book Seeks to “Shift the Lens on Race”

Has the social and political mindset on race in 2014 changed from where it was 100 years ago? What is the definition of “Blackness” in the modern age? These are just a few of the many questions posed by (1)ne Drop, a landmark new book that seeks to “shift the lens on race” in more ways than one. Written and compiled by Dr. Yaba Blay, Ph. D., a teacher and scholar in the subject of African Studies at Drexel University in Sacramento, CA [Philadelphia, PA], (1)ne Drop is an ambitious project. Part textbook, part photo essay, part academic thesis, (1)ne Drop is also this month’s indie groundbreaking book, and for more reasons than I can list.

On one hand, (1)ne Drop is groundbreaking for shedding a light on the troubling biological basis for much of the racism that has existed in the United States for more than 200 years. That basis is called the “one-drop rule,” a concept that says a person should be identified as “Black” if they have so much as a trace of Black ancestry (or so much as a single drop of Black blood) in their heritage. In the 1900s, the one-drop rule was an actual law, used throughout the southern parts of the country to promote “White racial purity” and overall White supremacy. But while the law is gone, the concept and the thought behind it still persists, and that question of racial identification permeates (1)ne Drop

Read the entire review here.

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