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her features aren't balancedOriginally posted by Tropicana View PostSee what I mean? Kerri Bayliss has represented Jamaican twice....in 2009 as Miss Jamaica World and this year as Miss Jamaica Universe.
Colourist are we?Comment
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channel surf wen dem reach h
isreal was wan aff dem wth
jamaica wass wan aff dem wteff
nah lie mii wass rootinn fe jamaica fe lose cah dat was a disgraceComment
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Clearly the horse is not dead if some are still hurling insults at me as if this is a non-issue...see opening post.Originally posted by queenb View PostComment
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Ah but she looks White and therefore has qualified to represent Jamaica in not one but TWO international pageants.Originally posted by Suesumba View PostComment
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We seem to be going backwards instead of forward since this was first published:
The Miss Jamaica Mulatto Factory
I’ll be the first to admit that a beauty contest is a pretty easy target. The bane of feminists, scholars, spunky girls, intelligent girls, hard achieving women, unpretty women and just about anybody aware that this is the 21st century, beauty contests have been around longer than them all and will be around presumably long after. That doesn’t grant them respect, but one does come away with a certain grudging admiration. It seems even foolish now to be appalled when a beauty queen conforms to stereotype—who expects a contestant to have a view on Marcus Garvey or Michel Foucault when the whole world needs to adopt a puppy? What beauty contests say about women is still an open and now tired debate, but what it says about race, particularly in a country like Jamaica is still up for grabs.
This is Facebook’s fault. Only this week somebody who shall remain nameless sent me a message, recruiting me on a campaign for (I can’t remember her name) to win Miss Jamaica. The winning Miss Jamaica would then represent the country at Miss World, where as you may not know ‘beauty’ comes ‘with a purpose.’ I took one look at the girl and remembered a remark I made in a review of Thomas Glave’s last book where I brought up the oh no he di-int specter of what I like to call Consensual Eugenics.
Consensual Eugenics. Post WW2, Nazis flocked incognito to the tropics; for anonymity to be sure, but you have to wonder if they had not marveled at what we’ve been doing for centuries in the Caribbean, without the help of a good old kristalnacht to spur us. The transmogrification from one race to another. Many white Jamaicans would be stunned, for instance to discover that they are actually black. This is neither new nor unique to Jamaica. Mr. Black man has sex with lighter black woman (or white woman if he hits a bonanza!) to produce brown child, or mulatto. Said brown child has sex with slightly browner woman (or whitey) to produce Quadroon. Said Quadroon has sex with other Quadroon (or whitey) to produce Octoroon. Said Octoroon, who can now pass, has sex with white woman to produce full free—er, white. This sounds like ancient history but black men and women are doing it right now or making plans in an office cubicle near you. I’ll never forget my shock when a former co-worker came back from the hospital blushing with pride that his bred a child that looked like his brown wife and not him. This from a graduate of a tertiary institution.
Consensual Eugenics however should not be mistaken for jungle fever. That is a matter of the heart or loins, both of which demand some form of heat. Nor is to be mistaken for genuine blind love. The least interesting thing about interracial couples is their race and they would be the first to tell you. But its the others, the ones who know what they are doing that bowl you over, mostly because sometimes I wonder if they have a point. We haven’t had a dark skin Miss Jamaica for some time now.
But aren’t light-skinned Negroes people too? Even a white Jamaican has a right to enter a beauty contest, even to win it, but the endless parade of different models of the same insipid mulatto female archetype has me wondering if these women are born at all, but engineered on some breeder assembly line hiding out in Vernam Field. Some may think my objection is racial. Some of these very women will quite proudly tell you that they are black, and our doubting them says far more about us that it does about them. The very distinction of “brown” says more about the person using the term than the person whom the term is being used. It’s not the race of these women that makes them so objectionable, but the blandness of them, the monolithic sameness of the brood that trots of 18 versions of the same model year after year. Lisa Hanna, a beauty queen of rare intelligence was a striking break from the norm (well sorta, being Indian...ish) but she has quickly become the exception that proves the rule, despite her being the last to actually win the Miss World crown. The very next year all contests went back to normal, popping another generic mulatta out the beauty poop chute, as if uptown high schools sold them by the bushel. It says something, though I’m not sure what, that the type of woman that won a beauty contest in 1979, looks absolutely no different from the type that won in 2007.Last edited by Tropicana; 11-10-2013, 03:08 PM.Comment
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More about the movie Dark Girls.
...think about how you could make a difference in our community and work as a unit. unite as one people..... IGNORING IT DOESN'T SOLVE IT...!
Directed by Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry
Produced by Bill Duke for Duke Media
and D. Channsin Berry for Urban Winter Entertainment
Co-Produced by Bradinn French
Edited by Bradinn French
Racism and skin colour: the many shades of prejudice
Deeply entrenched attitudes towards colour, and the increasing promotion of skin-lightening products, are placing a 'horrible burden' on dark-skinned women
The producers of Dark Girls hope their film will have the cross-continental appeal of Chris Rock's 2009 documentary, Good Hair.
"We had more than 725,000 hits to the preview in 28 days," says Berry. "And we had more hits from France and Germany and the Netherlands than from South Africa and Jamaica. It tells us what the world wants." He and Berry hope that their film will start a healing, something that, according to Berry, needs to start at home. "Reinforce that your child is beautiful. Don't only tell them, show them," he says.
Bresi-Ando says: "If we want to get to the next level, for other people to respect us as well, we have to respect and love ourselves. If you live your life making choices based around not liking yourself in the full glory of what you can be, why would anybody respect you?"When the film-makers released a preview of Dark Girls in May, it spread like wildfire across social media sites and black entertainment blogs. Commenters wrote about being moved to tears by the nine minutes of film they'd seen and many mentioned how long in coming such a film was. Why did the documentarians decide to tackle this subject and why now? For Duke, a veteran of Hollywood – co-star of Car Wash and Predator – it was down to personal experience. "It came from me being a dark-skinned black man in America, and also observing what [dark-skinned] relatives like my sister and niece have gone through. The issue exists externally of our race, but a lot of it comes within the race itself and our perception of ourselves." Berry recalls being called "darkie" at elementary school by his fellow classmates, "and even some family members were like: 'He is really dark. Why is he so dark?' It left a scar. So when Bill came to me, within the first couple of seconds, I was on board."Shadism lurks in our collective peripheral vision and rears its ugly head every so often. Earlier this year, there was a Twitter storm over a promotional flyer for a party in Ohio whose theme was "Light Skin vs Dark Skin".
In May, the Afro Hair and Beauty show in London had a stall advertising and selling skin-lightening products. The stall was called Fair and White. In an interview with black newspaper the Voice, the co-organiser of the show, Verna McKenzie, said that she had "a responsibility to cater to the marketplace". Two years ago, makeup giantL'Oréal was accused of lightening the skin of singer Beyoncé in ads (it denied the claim), and last year, Elle magazine was accused of doing the same to actor Gabourey Sidibe (it said "nothing out of the ordinary" had been done to the photograph). Last month, a study conducted at Villanova University in Pennsylvania found that lighter-skinned women were more likely to receive shorter prison sentences than darker-skinned women, receiving approximately 12% less time behind bars.
I am a dark-skinned girl. I always have been – I was never fair-skinned, not as a baby (like my sister), not as a child (like one of my brothers) nor an adolescent. My parents did not wait for my colour to "come in". I was born a deep brown, and have pretty much remained so all my life. My extended family is pretty diverse-looking – from my second cousin Ruka, who looks white in certain lights, to my cousin Baraka, who is dark as night; I never had any real inclination to be lighter-skinned, but almost every Nigerian Briton I spoke to while writing this article reported having seen bad bleach jobs at weddings, church and parties.
Growing up in Nigeria during the 90s, I remember being offered a soft drink, and my hostess jokingly telling me to choose something other than a Coke because it "would make me darker". Even being a fairly confident and logical child, and despite understanding that a drink had no effect on my complexion, I changed my mind. During a decade there, it would not be the only time I would alter my drink order.
The women in Dark Girls discuss the role melanin has played in their lives. One woman recalls asking her mother to add bleach to her bathwater so she "could escape the feelings that I had about not being as beautiful, as lovable". Another says: "It was so damaging, it made us feel like we were 'less than'."
The preview also shows a clip from a 2010 pilot study in which schoolchildren were asked to select from pictures of dolls ranging from light to dark. The researcher asks a five-year-old black girl to show her the smart child. The girl points to the image of the lightest child. She does the same when the researcher asks her to pick the good-looking child. Her reasons are "because she's white" and "because she's light-skinned". By contrast, she selects the darkest child when asked to pick out the "ugly" child and the "dumb" child. This time, her reason is "'cause she's black."
Similar studies were done in Jamaica with adolescents with the same results. A.S Phillips reported the results in the book Adolescence in Jamaica.
More: http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ades-prejudiceIt is an update on the doll experiments carried out by African-American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s, which sought to find out children's self-perception as related to race. They concluded that black children had internalised the racism caused by discrimination and segregation. "Our goal is to take that little girl's black finger off the picture that looks like her," says Duke. "If we can do that, maybe we will impact things, because the truth is that all of the dolls in that picture are beautiful."
The origins of colourism are widely believed to be in the "pigmentocracy" of slavery. Ruth Fisher, project manager of the Understanding Slavery Initiative, says: "Generally speaking on plantations, you had what you would call the house slaves and the field slaves. The delineation of shade in that regard would be those who were darker would be in the fields while those who were fairer or of mixed heritage would be the house slaves. Part of it was because of the fear factor; those who were more closely associated with being African or those who were new to the plantation would be darker and more resistant than those who were born on the plantation and therefore considered to be less aggressive, less rowdy.
"That started a divide within the African community on the plantation, because then those who were closer to the house had some of the less back-breaking work and therefore they felt that they were a bit more privileged."
Heidi Safia Mirza, professor of equalities studies in education at the Institute of Education, University of London, says: "Pigmentocracy in the Caribbean as a kind of social hierarchical system emulated from the slave days where there was favouritism if you were fairer, particularly if you were a woman." Mirza, who has been conducting her own research looking at young black and minority ethnic women in schools, tells the story of a Sierra Leonean teenager who reported being made fun of because of her very dark skin. "It was not uncommon for dark-skinned girls to be vilified and teased and called names like 'blick', which means 'blacker than black'."
Debbie Weekes-Bernard, senior research and policy analyst for education at the Runnymede Trust, wrote Shades of Darkness, a report on the way "darker-skinned girls reflect upon themselves against lighter-skinned (in this case mixed-parentage) girls" as part of her PhD. The subjects were girls between the ages of 12 and 16.Last edited by Tropicana; 11-10-2013, 03:20 PM.Comment
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Here is the film.
The beginning is heart breaking. Clearly this is not a non-issue.
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