#TreasuresofDarkness, Day 8. Job 30:30-Beauty is only skin deep and white
I hope, dear readers, you are enjoying and being challenged by these blog devotional posts. It’s Saturday night and in my new call here in the East Coast (or northeast…hell I’m in NYS sooooo) I have not one but two services over a weekend so my brain right now is immersed in Isaiah 58, powerful words but about all the words I can muster right now.
So here is the original post I wrote three years ago on Day 8, which hits close to home because this entirety about skin, and preferences and the colorism that still occurs, and the discrimination and racism because of beautiful Black skin that was not seen as the norm, and now is seen as a prop and cultural appropriation and “slumming in skin.”
Ache’
This,
is supposedly,
the essence of American beauty
And the standard
that we,
in this country,
are supposed to live up to.
These are the tools,
that have been given to us
to erase ourselves,
to be ashamed of our skin,
OUR BLACKNESS
In April Sinclair’s novel, Coffee Will Make You Black, Sinclair shares anecdotal stories of how her mother, wanting her daughter to get ahead in the tumultuous wars between Jim Crow oppression and Civil Rights explosion advises her not to drink coffee lest it ruin her skin color as well as routinely pushing bleaching creams because she wanted her children to get ahead in the world, and the only way to do that, was…
Assimilation
Black,
Was not seen,
As anything remotely
Beautiful
Being Black,
Was seen,
As
Diseased
Undesirable
Unwanted
Ungodly
My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat-Job 30:30
The Book of Job has always left me with both critique and an ongoing argument with the Creator; the stage set for a human, who has been faithful, seemingly throwing into a cosmic dryer set on “as dry as you can possibly get this.” Job laments throughout this, as he has been stripped of everything he has worked and held dear in his life. Job wrestles with the appearance that the Creator God has abandoned him, and everything that is horrible, bad and evil, is cloaked in gloom and darkness. That he is so wracked with pain and illness, his skin turns from the normal, pristine white to the ugliness of black.
Born into a hateful existence that my very being would be subjected to in this country, many of the images of beauty were always projected everywhere as WHITE. White was pure, acceptable and right.
White was Godly, surely
because, God was white
Beauty,
Wellness
Wholeness
should not be defined
By just ONE
Because the idea of the “other”
Rattles their conception that they are the prototype
If White, American Christianity keeps proclaiming loudly,
that they follow Jesus,
Then,
When Jesus commands,
to
“Love your neighbor,
as yourself.”
They,
are indeed
out
of
order.
The curator of this blog, the Rev. Kwame Pitts embraces who she is and her African heritage, proud that her Ancestors came from the vastness of West Africa and proud of her African/Creole heritage, because it is there remains a richness of spirituality into the traditional and ancient expressions of African Spirituality. She credits her roots and understanding that Black is indeed beautiful from her Mother, who was one of the first African American teachers in Chicago to teach and offer African American History as a course in secondary school education.
