Not So Black and White

Summer 2004

By Shwayla James

I first noticed Heidi Tolentino, a high school teacher who works with teen mothers, talking with instructor Linda Christensen at my summer Portland Writing Project class. Our assignment was to produce a writing lesson with another teacher that we could each take back to our classroom. I zeroed in on their conversation because they were discussing an experiment from the movie Separate, but Equal performed by Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps, in the 1950s called "The Doll Experiment." Clark and Phipps showed a black doll and a white doll to African-American children who lived with the demoralizing effects of segregation. The children associated the white doll with honor and beauty and the black doll with ugliness and shame. The experiment they were discussing triggered an emotional response for me, and I knew I had found my partner.

As I approached Heidi in an effort to develop a curriculum around this idea, I was overcome with my childhood scars. As a child, the secret prayers and desperate attempts to recreate myself in the light of images around me overtook any sense of self worth that my grandmother tried to instill in me. The world I lived in defined beauty as anything other than people of color. Why weren't my eyes blue? Why couldn't I have straight hair that didn't require the likes of straightening perms, pressing combs, hair grease, and many hours of upkeep? I wanted nothing more than to lie out in the sun with the copper-toned oils that mist my skin, only failing to realize I already had what they wanted . As a kid, I didn't want to be the person I saw when I looked in the mirror. Even after all these years of loving myself, I still need to talk back.

Summer 2004