Sing a Black Girl's Song: Body Image

For the last few weeks I've been working with fifth and sixth grade girls of African descent making collages, scrapbook pages, and whatever else you can imagine doing with magazines, glue sticks, and some poetry.

The first week or two the girls were pretty creative, but notice anything?



You guessed it. Light skin, long hair, slim to skinny figures. Yes, there are women of color in the last collage. But put in context with the other two (which are representative of the whole) it is both the exception and blatantly unexceptional. At the end of the day, all of the women look very much the same. When I took my girls work home and took a look, the glaring truth was disturbing and painfully obvious. Asked to find "positive" images, and when given no other guidance, they unerringly choose women who looked nothing like them.

But I took the responsibility on myself. After all, it was my mistake to give them mainstream magazines like Lucky and InStyle to choose their images from. So I went on a metaphoric dumpster dive for positive images and I gave them more specific instructions. On a canvas of pre-selected images of women obviously of African descent--with dark skin, kinky hair, and some with a little more bump to their rump, although that last was hard to find even in an Essence--the girls would add positive words from the same magazines, little pictures, and words/phrases from the poem "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou and "Let it Go" by Keyisha Cole.

I rubber cemented their images on cardstock and in class this week I passed them around.

Initial reaction --> "Uh UH! I don't want that one!"

Now, I let that slide. Normally I do let them choose their own images so it seemed logical that they would cry foul when I gave them what would be their main image. And, accordingly, when I made it clear that this was what they had to work with, most settled in.

But a couple of students were adamant. "I DON'T want that one. I don't want those!"

These were students with the images of the darkest women. One was what I thought was a shadowed image of a long, lanky woman with dark, velvety skin in an ad Johnson's Baby Oil. The other was an editorial page but the featured image was Angie Stone.

So I tried diplomacy. "Well, what's wrong with those images?"

"I don't want them. What about this one?" The one with Angie Stone flipped it over. Hers was one I'd forgotten to glue to cardstock. On the back was an ad with Beyonce Knowles at her tragic mulatta loveliest for American Express. I rolled my eyes inside. Jeez.

"No, not that one. In fact, here." I corrected my mistake, glued her image down, leaving her with Angie's dark eyes smiling at her. "Here you go."

"No!"

Meanwhile, across the table, the student with the Johnson's ad was cutting out a full page Herbal Essences ad prominently featuring an ambiguous Latina. "What are you going to do with that?," I ask. Diplomacy.

"I'm going to cover it," she smiled. And proceeded to place the ad, the entire full page, on top of the darker woman.

No way. Diplomacy, I saw, was going to have to go out the window. Not that I am one to crush creative impulses, but this was getting ridiculous. In actuality, I was beginning to feel a little helpless and frustrated.

I shook my head. "Nope. You have to use the image I gave you. You can add around it if you want."

She glared at me. When I looked up again, she'd cut out some words like "Beautiful" and "Feel Good."

And she'd placed them on top of the dark woman's face and thighs in preparation for gluing them down.

I moved quickly. "Whoa, buddy. Now what are you doing?"

The girl wrinkled her nose. "I'm trying to cover her! She's naked!"

"She's not naked. You can't even see anything. Just that beautiful brown skin." I said it deliberately. And she and her partner jumped right to the bait.

"Uh uh! She's not brown--she's CRISPY!"

"Yeah! She's BLACK!"

I smiled. "Oh yeah? You're right. And that's a Johnson ad, so she's all oiled up and beautiful. Something wrong with that?"

The girls blushed, smiling, shaking their head, shrugging--didn't know what to say. And I was thanking God that at least they didn't immediately respond that, "Yes, there IS something wrong with that." Because I don't know what I would have done.

So I tapped the image, deliberately moving the words out of the way. "She's got beautiful skin, don't you think? You should move the words around it to highlight that. And highlight her face."

Groans. Aww mans. Ahh, c'mons. But they moved the words around so that Beautiful floated (just below the face, dangerously close) gently along the woman's arm and Feel Good was tattooed on her thigh.



Meanwhile, the girl with Angie Stone was busy cutting out Beyonce and placing her beside Angie on her picture.



I watched warily, but decided there was only so much I could do with their creative license. I'd at least succeeded in stopping both of them enacting internalized oppression violence on the women's faces.

I spoke too soon.

One of my more promising students, a serious, creative girl who'd actually taken herself away from the group into the corner to work, came over with a smile. "I'm done!" I smiled back. I'd given her a fashion couture shot of a dark brown woman with braids coiled in a sophisticated coif around her head. I was excited to see what she came up with.



Beautiful. And violent. "This is really great--but why did you write across her face? And put "Rise" across her nose?"

This student had the presence of mind to blush. She shrugged. "I dunno. I messed up."

I was grinding my teeth inside, because I didn't want her to think she messed up! Darn it self-denigrating-youth-of-color!

"No, just think about it for next time. Try to find images that would frame her beautiful face. Especially the contrast with her clothes, how it highlights that lovely brown." Word choice deliberate. But she still looked a little flustered so I pointed out that the strawberries were a nice, clever touch. She went back to her seat smiling.

The rest of class was uneventful, or at least the events ran along similar lines. But by the end I was exhausted. I'd thought by giving them images of black women with no option to skate around them that they would simply transfer the positive from the white/mixed race to the dark. I thought it was an issue of lack of option.

But it was much more complicated than that. From outright erasure to discrete vandalizing, these girls did their best to remove themselves from identification with the images, to deny the beauty and humanity of the photos, and to replace/rewrite/retain the stereotypes of beauty/good/healthy/nice as white/light that they'd been socialized into. And they were prepared to argue with me on the matter! Although, like I said, at least they weren't so bold as to say directly to me, "Kinky hair is ugly and black skin is too."

Man. Kenneth Clark would have a field day.

And I won't lie--I felt personally attacked. Although I know they didn't mean it, here I sit, in solidarity with them, dark brown just like they are dark brown, kinky haired just like they are kinky haired (albeit some with relaxers) and the first image they reach for is lighter skinned, long haired Beyonce or Christina Milian. And, even more frightening, the first image they reject is dark skinned, curly haired Angie Stone. Where then does that leave us, my darlings? What do we think of ourselves if we are ready to paste newspaper over own arms and thighs to cover up the color, if we are ready to scrawl permanent marker across our faces, slam white paper over our flat noses to mask the sight, if we are read to tear out an image of a white woman and glue it wholescale over our entire SELVES because we don't like what we see?

The choosing of one the white image I was prepared for. The absolute rejection of the black one I was not.

And I'm not prepared, at all, to deal with this. How do I approach this issue in a way that is not going to squish their creative juices but is also going to challenge them on a deeper level to CRITIQUE these ideas of beauty that they are already indoctrinated into?

Any ideas? Comments welcome, necessary. Help me sing a black girl's song....