Name: _______________________________________American Poetry Unit: Body Image

Throughout this unit, we’ve been asking the question of how the culture and landscape of the United States has defined us. Over the past few weeks, we asked ourselves how our community and culture defines our understanding of love, violence, and death. This week, we’ll begin consider how different African American poets and academics respond to broad conversations about skin color and body image.

To begin this conversation, we will take notes and think as we watch a conversation that recently took place on Oprah.

Before viewing the clip, read this short, accompanying description.

In many parts of the world, people are judged not just by their skin color but also by their skin tone. The devaluing of dark-skinned women is something that hits close to home for African-American actresses in Hollywood as well.

For Alfre Woodard, Viola Davis, Phylicia Rashad and Gabrielle Union, the light skin vs. dark skin debate is one that is still prevalent in the entertainment industry, which they discuss on an episode of "Oprah's Next Chapter."

Oprah asks, "Is that still a major part of the way people think in this town?"

"Absolutely," Davis responds.

"In this town and in our community," Woodard adds.

Oprah then brings up something that [the woman] had shared with her earlier about being discouraged from auditioning for certain roles. "There were times when even your own people… would say, 'No, you can't go for that role because that's for the cute black girl," she says.

"I've gotten that," Davis admits. "I still feel like that's what we're fighting -- healing from the past. I think that it affects everything that we do. It affects our relationships. It affects our art."

"But that comes from us," Oprah points out.

"That's what I'm saying," Davis responds. "We haven't healed from that. We just haven't."Rashad jumps in. "Well, Lord, goodness. How long is it going to take?"

What are you initial thoughts about this conversation of dark vs light skin? What are the women talking about? Why does this conversation matter?

Dark Girls is a 2012 documentary film by American filmmakers Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry. It documents colorism based on skin tone among African Americans, a subject still considered taboo by many black Americans. The film contains interviews with notable African Americans including Viola Davis. It also reports on a new version of the 1940s black doll experiment by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which proved that black children had internalized racism by having children select a white or a black doll (they typically chose white) based on questions asked. In the updated version, black children favored light-skinned dolls over dark-skinned dolls.

Dark Girls explores the many struggles, including self-esteem issues, which women of darker skin face allowing women of all ages recount "the damage done to their self-esteem and their constant feeling of being devalued and disregarded.”

Duke and Berry even take it a step farther and interview African American men who claim they could not date a woman of dark skin. One young man interviewed saying “They [dark girls] look funny beside me.”

The documentary takes a look into the trend of black women all over the world investing in the multibillion dollar business of skin bleaching creams. Duke and Berry also examine how black women are trying to look more Caucasian while white women are trying to look more ethnic. “White women are risking skin cancer and tanning booths twice a week, Botoxing their lips, getting butt lifts to look more ethnic and crinkling up their hair.”

Before we watch the documentary, think of a few celebrities who have had their skin bleached or faces/bodies significantly altered so that they can look less black or Hispanic? Why do you think they’ve made these choices?

What are your initial responses to this video? What are you thinking now that you weren’t thinking earlier in this conversation? What questions do you have? What would you say to these men and women if you were in a room with them?

Name: _______________________________________American Poetry Unit: Body Image

Earlier this year, writer C. Vernon Coleman wrote about the debate of light vs. dark skinned women, especially as it plays out in popular music.

When it comes to the great skin color debate in the Black community, MCs tend to weigh in on the topic, intentionally or not, in their lyrics. As evidenced by A$AP Rocky’s recent opinion on which women should rock red lipstick and Consequence's line “Light skin is the right skin," rappers have shown they have very strong opinions on the subject of a woman’s skin color.

Preference is one thing, but some sound downright ignorant when it comes to talking about skin tones.

On the flip side, Kendrick Lamar was praised for requesting a dark-skin lead for his “Poetic Justice” visual. Giving sisters of all colors props is cool, but arguing over the superiority of light or dark is a dispute we wish would fade to black.

After reading following lyrics, decide what each is saying about skin color.

“Skin was cinnamon, I love her harder/How come the only girls that are thought of, are the light ones?/Well tonight then, we gon’ do it, do it, do it for the dark ones”

-Andre 3000 on Lil Wayne's “Interlude”

“Light skin girls, light skin world/Switching his vanilla ‘cause he likes that swirl” -Azealia Banks, “L8R”

“No cup for the thirsty, she bad as controversy/Skin-tone like Hershey, body Lord have mercy”

-Fabolous, “Ready” Feat. Chris Brown

“A lot of shit we can’t get passed/Like dark or light skin when it’s just black”–Angel Haze, “No Church In The Wild”

“Blue eyes but she blacker than Kunta/We don't believe you, you need more people/You need more grease in your hair, so they weaves you”

-Wale, “Acapella”

Your OpinionWeigh in on this conversation. Why do you think skin color is an issue in the Black community? What is the debate actually about? What is at stake?

Write a claim-evidence-analysis paragraph that captures your response to this question. Include ONE line of evidence that you’ll analyze.

Colourism: Why even black people have a problem with dark skinWhen I was a child my skin was praised by both white and black women - but more by black women. A new film, Dark Girls, is opening up the conversation on colourism, class and skin bleaching.

BY ELIZABETH PEARS | 15 OCTOBER 2013

Recently, my mother told me a story of myself as a child. When strangers approached me and said things such as: "Isn’t she lovely?" or "What pretty hair you have!" I would innocently answer: "I know". 

My unassuming arrogance would take people aback, then everyone would laugh at the adorable curly-haired prima donna, enough to assuage my mother's embarrassment. It would be easy to dismiss my younger self as a smug, precocious little brat, but it really just showed that when a child hears something enough times, they accept it as merely another fact of life.

As I grew older, I began to realize there were other factors at play, which made me uncomfortable.

Many of these compliments came from white women, but the majority came from black women, inside and outside of my own family. I was light-skinned with long thick hair thanks in part to my father's white English heritage. That was all that qualified me to be considered "beautiful".

It had nothing to do with being funny or smart but plenty to do with physical attributes over which I had no control. The confidence I had displayed as a young girl became insecurity then anger. I didn't want preferential treatment because of something as superficial as skin

colour or hair texture. My mother, the first woman I ever knew, loved and admired, was a dark-skinned black woman and, to me, the epitome of beauty and glamour. What was the big deal?

And then I realised and checked my own degree of privilege – it is far easier to resent one’s own skin for giving you advantages you haven’t earned than despising it for what it takes away.

Darker skinned women and, yes, men too, face that reality – an issue brought to the fore in the documentary Dark Girls, directed by Bill Duke, premiered in the UK last week.

Focusing primarily on African American women, the film opens up the conversation of colourism – a shameful discrimination generally against your own community on the basis of skin colour.

It is a legacy of slavery and plantation society that placed white slave-owners at the top of the top of the social ladder, followed by those who were mixed race/lighter skinned (who were given work in the house, with the added bonus of being a plaything for the massa, wahey!), with darker skinned black men and women (who were also raped – hence, the light-skinned house slaves) at the bottom of the pile doing the back-breaking labour in the cotton fields.

While the physical chains of bondage may be broken, for many in the black and Asian community, colourism is still a part of life – a psychological prison of self-loathing and envy. Comments such as, “You’re pretty ... for a dark skinned girl” or “I hope the baby comes out light” are par for the course.

Type dark skin or light skin into Twitter and you will seecolourismin action. One tweet: "Party on Friday. White Girls free. Light skin girls 5dollars. 50 dollars for dark skin girls". Another: "I thought cute dark skin girls with long hair was a myth ... I feel like I seen big foot." (sic) Within the past week, ‘dark-sinned vs light-skinned’ has been a trending topic. As one angry tweeter kindly pointed out, "Is this what Martin Luther King died for?"

Dark Girls makes for a haunting and uncomfortable watch. Listening to beautiful women admit to insecurities that led them to request bleach in their bath water or putting hair removal cream in the scalps of their light-skinned school peers as an act of jealousy would seem all but ridiculous if it didn’t hit so close to home.

It features men with pixelated faces trying and failing miserably to justify their own prejudices – "I just prefer light skin women". "Dark skinned women just look wrong next me" –to stories from African American women confessing black men would lust after them in private, but opt for a light skinned trophy to parade in public.

Some find it bemusing that journalists, feminists and social commentators devote so much time to discussing the politics of hair texture and skin colour but it is absolutely, unequivocally, political.

Based on these personal accounts, is it a coincidence that 50 per cent of all Black Caribbean men in Britain have partners outside their own race? Or that the majority of high-profile black men– from politicians to sport stars – have a white partner? Are they simply exercising their right to choose, or attempting to exorcise their own demons?

In the Caribbean, such as the Bahamas where I was born, the minority light skinned

community forms the majority of the ruling elite – the effects of generations of wealth and privilege and marrying the ‘right’ people from the ‘right’ (and light!) families.

The ugly truth is while racism – whether institutional, structural or ingrained – and inequality persists, so will colourism. It is no surprise that skin bleaching creams are most popular in developing countries.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 77 per cent of Nigerian women use them. In India – home to a third of the world’s poorest people – two thirds of all skin products contain lightening agents. For some, lighter skin is seen as a route out of poverty, creating opportunities to cheat a system engineered to oppress. It South Africa, it is the difference between being black and part of the ‘coloured’ middle class.

The women featured in Dark Girls weren’t born hating their skin, they hated the limited social outcomes it extended, the way they were treated and spoken to because of it. But while colourism differentiates, racism does not. Being mixed didn’t prevent me from being called a P*ki or a n*gger while growing up in the north east. We are all dark girls. 

Perhaps one of the most heart-wrenching moments of the documentary is its opening; when a beautiful cherubbarely five years old, cannot meet the camera’s gaze as she admits to hating being called black.

I hope that by having these conversations and confronting the enemy within, as well as the bigger picture, little black girls of any skin tone won’t ever have to question their looks. Society will learn to tell them they are beautiful, and their response, quite rightly, will be: “I know”.  

QuestionsPlease answer these questions on a separate sheet of paper. Use textual evidence from the article whenever possible.

1. According to the author, Elizabeth Pears, who would call her beautiful when she was growing up? Why did they say this to her?

2. Where does the idea of light skin having greater value come from according to this article? What are the historical roots of this form of discrimination?

3. Why does Pears believe lighted skinned Black and Caribbean people sometimes discriminate against their darker skinned peers?

4. According to this article, why do people in Africa and India use skin whitening creams in such high doses? What are the effects of this?

Dakar fashion week takes stand against skin bleachingBY ELISE KNUTSEN | Mon Jun 24, 2013

(Reuters) - Backstage at Dakar Fashion Week a group of young women squeeze into impossibly high heels while others sit still as make-up artists paint their eyelids a shining emerald color.All legs and cheekbones, the models are subject to the same pressures as their counterparts walking runways in London, Paris, and New York. And perhaps more.Like many women from the streets of Senegal, some fashion models in West Africa have bleached their skin, seeking to achieve a "café au lait" color regarded by some as the aesthetic ideal.This year, however, Senegal's marquee fashion event is making a stand against the damaging practice."I am against it," said Adama Ndiaye, better known as Adama Paris, who started the annual fashion fete in 2002.Ndiaye announced at the opening of Dakar Fashion Week that she had banned any models using skin depigmentation cream from participating in the six-day event.A local newspaper, Sud Quotidian, claimed more than 60 percent of Senegalese women use skin bleaching products for non-medical reasons.Women of all classes and education levels use these often unregulated skin creams. Well-heeled and unshod women across Senegal bare the tell-tale signs of long-term bleaching - blotches of discolored skin on their arms and faces."I'm trying to teach them to like themselves," said Ndiaye of the natural-toned models selected for this year's show.Self-esteem is not the only issue at stake, according to dermatologist Fatoumata Ly."In my practice, I see a huge number of women with complications from this practice," Ly said.Women often use prescription-strength corticosteroid creams to lighten their skin, she said."When absorbed into the blood stream, corticosteroids pose serious risks, particularly for the heart," she said. Skin cancer is also a potential side effect.This year's collections emphasized sleek minimalist designs, in forceful primary colors and jet blacks, with designs targeting international women. Models strutted in towering Louboutin platform pumps down a runway inside a luxurious nightclub.The African designers showcasing their talents hailed Ndiaye's public stance at the event, which ended on Sunday.Sophie Nzinga Sy, a couturier educated at the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York, was infuriated when she saw huge billboards promoting skin lightening products springing up around Dakar."It was ridiculous," she said of the blanched face used in the advertising campaign. "Our skin is something that we should value."Sidling nervously between hair and make-up stations, models also expressed their support for Ndiaye's initiative. "I think it's a great idea," said Dorinex Mboumba. "It will discourage others from the practice.""We don't need to change the color of our skin to be beautiful."For Ndiaye herself, the stand against skin bleaching largely boils down to aesthetics."It's not even pretty," she said. "For me, it's just a turn off."(Editing by Daniel Flynn and Paul Casciato)

Black Women and FatBy ALICE RANDALL | May 5, 2012

FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.

Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.

How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.

Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program.

And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.

When the biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested in a public lecture at Harvard this past

Josephine Baker embodied a curvier formof the ideal black woman.

February that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law, the audience applauded, the Harvard Gazette reported. A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.

I live in Nashville. There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner. Only now the saying goes, there’s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis.

The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.

WE have to change. Black women especially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51 percent higher obesity rates than whites do. We’ve got to do better. I’ve weighed more than 200 pounds. Now I weigh less. It will always be a battle.

My goal is to be the last fat black woman in my family. For me that has meant swirling exercise into my family culture, of my own free will and volition. I have my own personal program: walk eight miles a week, sleep eight hours a night and drink eight glasses of water a day.

I call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10 percent of our body weight that often results in a 50 percent reduction in diabetes risk. Sleeping better may be key, as recent research suggests that lack of sleep is a little-acknowledged culprit in obesity. But it is not just sleep, exercise and healthy foods we need to solve this problem — we also need wisdom.

I expect obesity will be like alcoholism. People who know the problem intimately find their way out, then lead a few others. The few become millions.

Down here, that movement has begun. I hold Zumba classes in my dining room, have a treadmill in my kitchen and have organized yoga classes for women up to 300 pounds. And I’ve got a weighted exercise Hula-Hoop I call the black Cadillac. Our go-to family dinner is sliced cucumbers, salsa, spinach and scrambled egg whites with onions. Our go-to snack is peanut butter — no added sugar or salt — on a spoon. My quick breakfast is a roasted sweet potato, no butter, or Greek yogurt with six almonds.

That’s soul food, Nashville 2012.

I may never get small doing all of this. But I have made it much harder for the next generation, including my 24-year-old daughter, to get large.

Alice Randall is a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Ada’s Rules.”

Name: ______________________________________American Poetry Unit

Throughout this week, we’re reading poetic and lyrical responses to the debate around skin color and body image in the Black community. Today, we’ll expand our conversation as we annotate and critically investigate the lyrics to the musical group TLC’s “UnPretty”.

TLC is an American girl group whose repertoire spanned R&B, hip hop, soul, funk, and new jack swing. TLC originally composed singer Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, rapper Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes and singer Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas. The group was very successful in the 1990s and early 2000s in spite of numerous spats with the law, each other, and the group's record label.

UnPrettyBy TLC

I wish could tie you up in my shoesMake you feel unpretty tooI was told I was beautifulBut what does that mean to youLook into the mirror who's inside thereThe one with the long hairSame old me again today (yeah)

My outsides look coolMy insides are blueEverytime I think I'm throughIt's because of youI've tried different ways But it's all the sameAt the end of the day I have myself to blameI'm just trippin'

[Chorus:]You can buy your hair if it won't growYou can fix your nose if he says soYou can buy all the make up That M.A.C. can makeBut if you can't look inside you

Find out who am I tooBe in the position to make me feel So damn unprettyI'll make you feel unpretty too

Never insecure until I met youNow I'm bein' stupidI used to be so cute to meJust a little bit skinnyWhy do I look to all these things To keep you happyMaybe get rid of you And then I'll get back to me (hey)

My outsides look coolMy insides are blueEverytime I think I'm throughIt's because of youI've tried different ways But it's all the sameAt the end of the day I have myself to blameI'm just trippin'

On a separate sheet of paper, complete the prompt below with your group.

TLC’s “UnPretty” criticizes the way African American women are made to feel about

themselves and their bodies. Specifically, the lyrics argue… A close examination of the

lyrics__________ proves this point. In these lines, TLC is saying…

Name: ___________________________________American Poetry Unit

her tin skinBy Evie Shockley

i want her tin skin. i want 1       her militant barbie breast,resistant, cupped, no, cocked       in the V of her elbow. i wantmy curves mountainous 5 and locked. i want her       arabesque eyes, i want hertar markings, her curlicues,       i want her tin skin. sheis a tree, her hair a forest 10 of strength. i want to be       adorned with bottles. iwant my brownness       to cover all but the silveredges of my tin skin. My 15 sculptor should have made       me like her round-belliedmaker hewed her: with chain-       saw in hand, roughly. cutaway from me everything 20 but the semblance of tender.       let nothing but my flexedfoot, toeing childhood, tell     the night-eyed, who knowhow to look, what lies within. 25

On a separate sheet of paper, complete this prompt on your own.

Evie Shockley’s “her tin skin” documents an African American woman’s experience of her

body. Specifically, the poem’s speaker argues/feels… A close examination of the line(s)

__________ proves this point. In this quote, the poem’s narrator is saying…

With your group, you will have 15 minutes to gather evidence from Shockley’s poem. Afterwards, you’ll be given time to write a short response using the prompt on the back of this sheet of paper.

First, gather evidence (words and phrases) and explain what each piece of evidence might mean.

Evidence Analysis “i want her militant barbie breast” (lines 1-2) Barbie is a popular doll sold to girls; real women

cannot achieve the doll’s dimensions. So, maybe the poem’s speaker wants a body that’s not realistic. Militant means rigid and extreme.

Major themes:

Evie Shockley’s poem is arguing that…

Name: ___________________________________________American Poetry Unit: Evie Shockley’s “her tin skin”

Respond to the question: What is the speaker in Shockley’s poem arguing about her experience with her body?

Evie Shockley’s “her tin skin” documents an African American woman’s experience of her

body. Specifically, the poem’s speaker argues/feels… [claim]

A close examination of the line(s) _____________________ proves this point. [evidence]

In this quote, the poem’s narrator is saying… [evidence]

Name: ______________________________American Poetry Unit

Nigger-Reecan Blues Willie Perdomo (for Piri Thomas)

Hey, Willie. What are you, man? Boricua? Moreno? Que?

I am.

No, silly. You know what I mean: What are you?

I am you. You are me. We the same. Can’t you feel our veins drinking thesame blood? 5

—But who said you was a Porta Reecan?—Tú no eres Puerto Riqueño, brother.—Maybe Indian like Gandhi Indian.—I thought you was a Black man.—Is one of your parents white? 10—You sure you ain’t a mix of something like—Portuguese and Chinese?—Naaaahhhh…You ain’t no Porta Reecan.—I keep telling you: The boy is a Black man with an accent.

If you look closely you will see that your spirits are standing right next to 15our songs. Yo soy Boricua! You soy Africano! I ain’t lyin’. Pero mi pelo eskinky y kurly y mi skin no es negra pero it can pass…

—Hey, yo. I don’t care what you say—you Black.

I ain’t Black! Everytime I go downtown la madam blankeeta de madeeson avenue sees that I’m standing right next to her and she holds her purse just 20a bit tighter. I can’t even catch a taxi late at night and the newspapers saythat if I’m not in front of a gun, chances are that I’ll be behind one. I won-der why…

—Cuz you Black, nigger.

I ain’t Black, man. I had a conversation with my professor. Went like this: 25

—Where are you from, Willie?—I’m from Harlem.—Ohh! Are you Black?—No, but——Do you play much basketball? 30

Te lo estoy diciendo, brother. Ese hombre es un moreno!Míralo!Mira yo no soy moreno! I just come out of Jerry’s Den and the coconut spray off my new shape-up sails around the corner, up to the Harlem 35River and off to New Jersey. I’m lookin’ slim and I’m lookin’ trimand when my homeboy Davi saw me, he said: “Coño, Papo. Te

parece comoun moreno, brother. Word up, bro. You look like a stone blackkid.” 40

—I told you—you was Black.

Damn! I ain’t even Black and here I am sufferin’ from the youngBlack man’s plight/the old white man’s burden/and I ain’t evenBlack, man/a Black man/I am not/Boricua I am/ain’t never reallywas/Black/like me… 45

—Leave that boy alone. He got the Nigger-Reecan Blues

I’m a Spic!I’m a Nigger!Spic! Spic! No different than a Nigger!Neglected, rejected, oppressed, and depressed 50From banana boats to tenementsStreet gangs to regiments…Spic! Spic! I ain’t nooooo different than a Nigger.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Poets, 2014), Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W.W. Norton, 1996).

His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Mandorla, and African Voices. 

He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books, a VONA/Voices faculty member, and is currently an Instructor in English at Phillips Exeter Academy, located in Southern New Hampshire.

Nigger-Reecan Blues Willie Perdomo (for Piri Thomas)

With your group, you will have 15 minutes to gather evidence from Perdomo’s poem. Afterwards, you’ll be given time to write a short response using the prompt on the back of this sheet of paper.

The questions: What experience is Perdomo working through in this piece? What is he saying to the people who question his race? What is his message to other people?

Evidence Analysis

Major themes:

Willie Perdomo’s poem is arguing that…

Name: ___________________________________________American Poetry Unit: Willie Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues”

Writing the Claim-Evidence-Analysis (CEA) Paragraph

The questions: What experience is Perdomo working through in this piece? What is he saying to the people who question his race? What is his message to other people?

1. Willie Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues” is about…2. Specifically, the poem’s speaker argues/feels… [claim]3. A close examination of the line(s) __________ proves this point. [evidence]4. In this quote, the poem’s narrator is saying… [analysis]

Seeing Opportunity In A Question: 'Where Are You Really From?'November 11, 2013

Alex Sugiura was featured, along with his brother and other mixed-race Americans, in the 125th anniversary issue of National Geographic Magazine in October. The brothers are of Japanese and Eastern European descent, but people often mistake Alex for Hispanic.

Martin Schoeller/National Geographic

More From 'The Changing Face Of America'

See more of Martin Schoeller's portraits from "The Changing Face Of America" and read Michele Norris' post, "Visualizing Race, Identity, and Change," for the National Geographic photography blog, Proof.

NPR continues a series of conversations about The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into those six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition.

"Where are you from?"

"No, really, where are you from?"

Those questions about identity and appearance come up again and again in submissions to The Race Card Project. In some cases, Norris tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, people say it feels accusatory — like, 'Do you really belong?'

It's also a question that Alex Sugiura, because of his racially ambiguous appearance, can't seem to escape.

Sugiura, 27, is the child of a first-generation Japanese immigrant father and a Jewish mother of Eastern European descent. Sugiura's brother Max looks more identifiably Asian, but when people meet Alex, they're often not satisfied to hear that he's from Brooklyn.

Some people find this question accusatory, as if the person being asked doesn't quite belong. But Sugiura actually welcomes the question and the conversations that flow out of it — and he says he understands why people ask.

"I have always thought I've had a particularly strange face," he explains. "I looked at my parents growing up and I didn't see their faces in my face — I did see some combination, some mixture." When he looked in the mirror, he says, he didn't see a "typical American face."

That may be so, but Sugiura's face, along with his brother Max and other adults and children of mixed race, was recently highlighted in the October issue of National Geographic. "The Changing Face of America" examines the nation's growing number of multiracial people and how they choose to identify themselves.

When Sugiura fills out question about race in the census form, he checks the box for Japanese. But in more casual situations, he self-identifies as American but says he's ethnically Jewish.

But for as long as Sugiura can remember, he's been confused with someone of Latin American descent. It first happened when he was 6 or 7 years old, when someone began asking him questions in Spanish. "And at that point, I had no faculty for the language and almost started crying cause I was just so terrified," he says.

But by age 11 he started to take Spanish classes. And while he'd already been taking Japanese language and cultural classes for years, he found he enjoyed Spanish much more.

"It was a passing fancy at first, this idea [that] by people jokingly or mistakenly identifying me as Hispanic. ... I thought there was some kind of safe space there, you might say — that I was given a kind of fictional persona," Sugiura says. "I would say it propelled me forward and I feel very much like my own man through the Spanish language."

There's another interesting wrinkle in Sugiura's thoughts on the intersection of race and appearance, Norris says, noting that this particularly sensitive subject was a bit tough for Sugiura to talk about. "He says that his height, his deep voice, his Type A personality, his sort of, big physical presence, has helped him sidestep ... some of the more painful, offensive stereotypes that are too often attached to Asian men."

Sugiura bristles at those stereotypes, and yet, he notes that his father "did us a great favor by marrying our mother. ... They made two tall, loud boys."

"When you're a typical, you know, shorter, soft-spoken Asian male, you are perceived almost to be weaker or lacking the fiber of what an American leader is supposed to be," he says.

The Sugiura family's appearance raises questions in the American South

Sugiura says this all goes back to the reason that he welcomes this question, "Where are you really from?" He sees that question as an opening to make the point that there are many different ways to be Asian, Jewish, white or even a New Yorker. "And he has a chance to make that point," Norris explains, "if he actually gets to participate in those conversations."

And, Sugiura notes, this question about where you come from can lead to some very unexpected conversations — like one his family experienced on a stop at a gas station in the American South. An older white man behind the counter asked his father, "Where are you from, boy?"

And while the question felt laden with tension, the outcome of the encounter surprised everyone. But the experience was a reminder, Sugiura says, of the unfortunate reality that one must assume the worst in this country when it comes to questions based on the color of one's skin.

What It Means To Be 'Black In Latin America'NPR | July 27, 2011

Between 1502 and 1866, 11.2 million Africans disembarked from slave ships in the New World during the Middle Passage. Of those 11.2 million people, only 450,000 came to the United States. The rest of the African slaves who survived the journey were taken to the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.

"Brazil got 4.8 million slaves alone," says historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. "When I was growing up, I thought to talk about the slave trade was to talk about the experiences of our ancestors here in the United States. But it turns out that the real 'African-American experience' — judging by numbers alone — unfolded south of our borders."

That world, says Gates, is the one he wanted to explore in Black in Latin America, a book and four-part documentary series airing on PBS, which traces the cultural history and the lasting impact of the millions of slaves who arrived in Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic,

Haiti, Mexico and Peru.

"The average American — and even the average academic and the average journalist — has no idea of the huge number of black people who landed south of the United States over the course of the slave trade," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

A Spectrum Of Race

The descendents of slaves brought to Latin and South America, says Gates, don't identify as white or black the way many Americans do. In Brazil, there are 134 categories of blackness to describe someone of African descent.

"[They say], 'I'm not black. I'm murano [or] I'm kubuku,' he says. "You could say that these societies have refused to be locked into this ridiculous binary opposition between black and white the way we are here in America, and they've socially constructed race or ethnicity in a more subtle way than we could ever imagine."

In each of the countries Gates examined, there were also policies enacted to "whiten" the complexion of the country soon after receiving an influx of slaves. In Brazil for instance, 4 million white Europeans and 185,000 Japanese immigrants were allowed into the country between 1884 and 1939. Cuba and Mexico also had similar policies in place.

"They were trying to do two things," says Gates. "They wanted to bring in white families so that the white population would increase. But they also assumed, because so many of these indentured immigrants would be men, that interracial sexual liaisons would ensue — and indeed they did. So whitening was to be achieved in two ways — through white people marrying white people — and a browning movement, when a series of racial gradations would be created through interracial sexuality."

In many countries in Latin America, says Gates, race is no longer recorded as part of the census.

"But there's a slight problem with that," he says. "If because of historical reasons, the people who are disproportionately discriminated against happen to be that group of people with dark skin, kinky hair and thick lips, how do you count them if you don't have a census category?"

In both Mexico and Peru, political activists are fighting for the right to have race reintroduced in the federal census.

"Until that's done, political activists can't argue for affirmative action or more equal opportunity because they have no statistics," says Gates. "A great academic told me that he went to the government to complain about the lack of blacks in higher education, and he was told, 'We don't have racism because we don't have races.' And if you can't count the race, then you can't have racism. And that is the pernicious argument that they're trying to fight with this movement to expand the categories on the federal census."

Questions:

It’s not surprising to us that race is far more complex and artificial than most people assume. In what ways do you think the conversation about race in the US needs to be more complex?

Gates’ research shows us that there are at least 134 words to describe different types of blackness in Brazil. How many words exist in the US to describe different types of skin color? Which words do you use to describe yourself? What do these words mean to you?

Black women heavier and happier with their bodies than white women, poll findsBy Lonnae O’Neal Parker | February 27, 2012

In the pre-dawn darkness, the gym doors close, and the black women start to move. House versions of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman,” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” blare from speakers as the 30 or so women, most with curves, not angles, grab their jump ropes at the L.A. Fitness club in Capitol Heights. They double-time it as fitness instructor Michelle Gibson counts them down from the front of the class.

“Four more, three more, two more, one!” she yells, twirling her rope. She jumps faster and faster until the rope and her sneakers blur on the hardwood. Her ample bosom strains against the top of her sequined half-camisole.

“Show-off!” yells a woman from the back as Gibson laughs. She demonstrates hinge-kicks high above her own head, and sweat darkens the waistband of the fitted black pants that cling to the uber-roundness of her bottom. “Fight for your sexy!” she commands her class.

No one in this boot camp works out to be model thin. And nearly to a person, they reject any notion that they should, or that that standard is even cute. Or realistic. Or mentally healthy.

That’s especially true of Gibson, 41, who has been a fitness instructor for 12 years, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at her.

Like many black women, Gibson describes her 5-foot-4, size 14-plus physique as “thick,” and considers herself ultra-feminine — no matter what the mainstream culture has to say about it.

She’s one of the most full-figured women in the gym, but she’s in love with her body. And it’s a sentiment that syncs perfectly with a recent survey conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation that focused on African American women. The poll found that although black women are heavier than their white counterparts, they report having appreciably higher levels of self-esteem. Although 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women report having high self-esteem, that figure was 66 percent among black women considered by government standards to be overweight or obese.

This is not news to Gibson or the other women in her morning boot camp class. They grew up listening to songs like the Commodores’s “Brick House” and hearing relatives extol the virtues of “big legs” and women with meat on their bones.

The notion that all women must be culled into a single little-bitty aesthetic is just one more tyranny, they say. And black women have tools for resisting tyranny, especially from a mainstream culture that has historically presented them negatively, or not at all.

Freed from that high-powered media gaze, generations of black women have fashioned their own definitions of beauty with major assists from literature and music — and help from their friends.

At this gym in Capitol Heights at the crack of dawn, and in myriad other places, that thinking has made black women happier with their bodies than white women in many ways. And in some ways, it’s put them on the slippery slope toward higher rates of obesity.

Gibson, who grew up in Prince George’s County and works full time as a National Institutes of Health contractor, is a personal trainer and teaches 10 aerobics classes a week.

“I’m a full-figured woman who would run circles around the average person, and I know it,” she says. “I kind of think it’s my secret weapon.”

Gibson, who says she’s over 150 pounds but under 200, has been plus-sized most of her life. And it took time to come to terms with that.

“High school is where I started to realize I was different,” said Gibson, who was captain of the cheerleading squad at Suitland High School. “My quads were big, I had these boobs, and I had a butt. Not only that, I was dark with short hair. That’s when I had to look in the mirror and say, ‘Either I’m going to go with it, or I’m going to go against it.’ I always went with it.”

Doctors have long told her she needs to lose weight — 30 or 40 pounds, according to their charts. She’d be cool with 15. She tried weight loss programs such as Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem in years past, but “I came to realize that I have to have some freedom to eat.”

Instead of fixating on shedding weight, she focuses on being fit and healthy and finding her joy in that: “This is how I’m genetically designed, and I’ve accepted that.”

And though she’s never married, she contends she never lacks boyfriends, black and white. “Men have always said to me, ‘You’re not fat, you’re p-h-a-t fat.’ And when I’m not teaching, I’m all girl.”

She takes time with her makeup, sometimes adding lashes. She keeps her short hair groomed, and her jeans, boots and turtlenecks neat and form-fitting.

According to the Post-Kaiser poll, which offers the most extensive and nuanced look at the lives of black women in decades, 28 percent of black women say that being physically attractive is “very important,” compared with 11 percent of white women. White women were more likely than black women to say being attractive was “somewhat important.”

For African American women, that desire often gets defined in ways the mainstream culture doesn’t recognize.

Princeton professor Imani Perry teaches interdisciplinary classes in African American studies and notes black women have conceptions of beauty that are “not just tied to the accident of how you look as a consequence of your genes.” They include style, grooming, how you present and carry yourself, and “how you put yourself together, which I think generally speaks to the fact that we have a much broader and deeper conception of beauty.”

Gibson’s mission is to get women to embrace their size but to work toward being fit. She preaches acceptance but says white fitness professionals often seem almost resentful of her confidence.

“If I were this plump, meek person doing the same thing I do, I think they would embrace me.”

Her rule: “Do you,” Gibson says, “and be okay with me being me. I can never be mad at this thin person. I say, ‘You’re sexy, you’ve got it going on. But don’t think for one minute that I don’t feel the same about myself.’ ”

It’s an attitude with long roots. Perry remembers relatives calling her lucky growing up, “because you’re little, but you’ve got big legs.”

“Historically, [self-esteem] research on black girls and women has always been the highest among all groups,” Perry says. “It’s really a powerful statement about our resilience given the dominant images of black women present in American culture, which have been generally degrading and unattractive, or hypersexual and less feminine.”

Althea Cuff, a medical technologist from Largo, has been a regular at morning boot camp for years. She lingers after class with the women who have become part of her fitness community. She’s tall, and her blue sleeveless tank shows off well-toned arms. Cuff grew up overweight but lost 64 pounds more than two decades ago.

“I wanted to get healthy,” says Cuff, who is 5-foot-6 and 165 pounds.

In the Post-Kaiser survey, 90 percent of black women say living a healthful lifestyle is very important to them, outranking religion, career, marriage and other priorities. Yet two-thirds report eating at fast-food restaurants at least once a week, and just more than half cook dinner at home on a regular basis.

For Cuff, being healthy doesn’t mean being a size 2: “That’s not what I grew up seeing. It wasn’t in my makeup. It’s not about trying to identify with somebody else.”

Even when celebrities such as Queen Latifah and Jennifer Hudson have touted dramatic weight loss in magazines and commercials, they have largely retained their curves. Among black women who want to lose weight, having model proportions is often not the goal.

For 10 years, Joseph Neil has worked with people of all races across the Washington area as a full-time trainer and certified nutritionist. Black women usually come to him with a body-mass index (a measurement of weight to height) of 29, while for white women it’s usually 22 or 23, he says. Anything over 25 is considered overweight.

He attributes the higher BMI among African American women to work demands, which he

says lead to fast-food lifestyles, less exercise and fewer healthful eating options in majority-black places such as Prince George’s County.

Among Neil’s clients, white women “are self-conscious about the numbers. They say I want to weigh 110, 115, 120.” Black women, who always say they want to keep their curves, “give me sizes — 6, 8, 10, 12.”

“White women are not coming to a trainer saying I want to be a 12. Every white woman who wants to work out and train wants to be petite, petite, no curves, no hips, no butt, nothing, just toned,” he says.

In 2008, Heather Hausenblas, a University of Florida professor of exercise physiology, co-wrote a study looking at the role the media played in body image among white and black women. Both groups were exposed to the ideal tall, thin white woman’s physique, and their moods were compared before and after. White women felt badly about themselves after viewing the idealized physique; black women were unaffected.

Black women “are just not comparing themselves to these white models,” Hausenblas says. Caucasian women are internalizing the images; black women are not.

And it’s the internalizing that damages women’s self-esteem. Right after Adele won six Grammy awards, Vogue sparked an uproar by Photoshopping an image of the buxom British singer to make her appear thinner for the magazine’s March cover. It’s the kind of falsehood and manipulation that makes women and girls starve themselves, experts say.

New York-based writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis calls it the “one act of cultural violence that we didn’t endure” — the one way that black women “being ignored by the media and all things glamorous worked for us.”

Is that lack of pressure changing as young women — black and white — aspire to look like Tyra Banks, Halle Berry or Beyonce? Possibly. There is anecdotal evidence that the number of African Americans seeking treatment for long-hidden eating disorders is on the rise.

Meanwhile, for young black women, the hunger to be seen, to be part of the beauty conversation, has often meant accepting even demeaning portrayals, says Daphne Valerius, 30, who produced an award-winning documentary in 2007 called “Souls of Black Girls.”She points to the proliferation of images of gyrating, scantily clad black dancers and models in music videos, social media sites and elsewhere as particularly poisonous.

“I have cousins who are 13 and 14,” Valerius says. “That’s the image they are seeing of themselves in the media.”

Still, the range of what’s considered beautiful for African American women remains more elastic. Black women were excluded for so long, says Davis, “we got to judge ourselves.” And cultural supports sprang up to help.

Essence and Ebony magazines offered their own visions of black beauty. The Ebony Fashion Fair took black glamour on the road.

“There was no Anna Wintour saying yes or no. The aisles at church were a runway, ‘Soul Train’ was a runway, the first day of school was a runway,” Davis says. “Jet magazine began offering its beauty of the week — aspiring dental hygienists, complete with measurements — and skinny women need not apply.”

Every generation had celebratory songs blasting from the radio. “I have a very clear image of hearing the Commodores playing ‘Brick House,’ and all my cool aunties in high-waist jumpsuits got up to dance. It was an anthem for them to shine.”

In the lexicon, women weren’t fat, they were “thick,” “healthy,” “big-boned.” They had “nice futures” behind them. Food was love, rituals around food were bonding and thinness held limited appeal for people who had bone memories of privation and scarcity.

But Davis acknowledges that with fewer cultural deterrents, black women are more likely to slip into obesity, and that’s not celebrated. In 2009, black women had an obesity rate of of almost 43 percent, compared with 25 percent for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a result, African American women suffer from higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and other serious health problems.

“We’re not saying its super fly to be super fat. We’ve never said that,” Davis contends, but unlike in white culture, “black women are not criminalized for it.”

At morning’s first light at a gym in Capitol Heights, Michelle Gibson is exhorting her class. “You’re athletes,” she tells them, as long as you work it, no matter what size you are.

“The thing about black women is we’re all these little diamonds and each one of us is different,” she says later. “You’re not shaped the way I’m shaped, but you’re still a diamond.”

Once you realize that, “the sky is the limit.”

Once you realize that, “you can come into the room and own the room.”

Explore the full poll data

VIDEO: Shifting portraits of the American black woman

In African American pop culture, ‘thick’ is in

Polling director Jon Cohen and polling manager Peyton M. Craighill contributed to this report.