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bootymacaroni · 4 years

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Colorism: Anti-blackness in the Black Community

Racism is something that there is no hiding it still very prominent in the world today. Black folx and POC do not face the same burdens as our ancestors, but there seems to be this notion among Black Americans that we must be black before anything else. We must carry the burdens of our past on our backs even if we are not still facing the same burdens as those that fought for use to have the life and privileges that we have now.

We all know that know that racism is real, alive and sadly apart of our “American Culture”, but what no one seems to want to talk about or admit to being a real thing is that anti-blackness and racism in the Black Community.

Colorism or shadeism is a real problem, not only here in America, but also in Latin America, East & Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Outside of the US, colorism is seen more from a class perspective than White Supremacy, White skin was seen as superior due to the ruling classes at the time having lighter complexions. Peasants developed tans from working outside, and because of this, having light skin meant you were able to receive employment opportunities, while their darker counterparts did not.

In order to even begin fighting against colorism, we need to first define it, it’s origins and its history.

For starters, colorism has been around since as early as 1619, but back then it was more commonly referred to as colorphobia or “Negreophobia”. It wasn’t until Alice Walker, an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist best known for her publication for the novel “The Color Purple”, was credited for being the first to use the word colorism. Walker defined colorism as, the prejudicial or preferential treatment of the same race of people based solely on their skin tone.

There is no denying that colorism originates as lighter skin tones being more favorable than darker skin tones. Colorsim began because during slavery times, light skinned slaves had the privilege of working doing domestic tasks, while dark skinned slaves worked in the fields. Light skinned children were not acknowledged as the offspring their slave owners, which still lead to them being treated better than darker skinned slaves. This meant that light skin was considered to be an asset in the Black Community.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the “Paper Bag Test” was introduced in order to see if you were going to be permitted into special social clubs for those considered to be “free slaves”. A paper bag was placed up to your skin and if you were the same color of the paper bag or lighter you were granted access to the spaces and were considered for hire. If you were darker, you were not granted access and looked over for hire.

Colorism also stemmed from the fact that black slaves were not allowed to be educated. This lead to black individuals believing that having an education was “anti-black”. Many believed that “schools and blacks don’t go together”. Many black kids were teased and mocked for “acting white” because they were viewed as thinking they were better than their peers. Kids were sought out and asked to spell words or answer math questions and if they answered correctly they were beaten up. Gifted black students had to choose between peer acceptance or intellectual achievements. Most chose acceptance. This is why many believed that kids didn’t do well in school.

Along with all of this, the black community struggles with internalized racism. Internalized racism or internalized oppression is a conscious or unconscious acceptance of racial hierarchy in which whites are constantly ranked above POC. This can be shown by having beliefs in racist stereotypes, adaptations of white cultural standards, and thinking that supports the status quo ( denying that racism exists ).

Because of this internalized racism, black women, more commonly dark skinned black women, are seen as incapable of processing information, thinking or succeeding independently, are unintelligent, undesirable or beautiful, need to be dominated or “tamed”, and are constantly talked down upon and insulted, and because of this white skin became greatly desired.

White skin was so coveted that skin lighten creams are some of the best selling products in the US, Asia, and many other Nations.

None of this is a secret when it comes to the history of dark skinned black women, but still more knowledge, understanding, compassion and acknowledgment are needed around these subjects and they pertain to dark skinned black women and the racism and colorsim they have faced for decades and still continue to have to deal with today.

With that being said, there is another aspect of colorism we still need to face because too many in the black community either think it is not a thing, or do not wish to believe it is a real problem and that is the black eraser of light skinned blacks.

Creoles in Louisiana were told “You’re too white to be black and you’re too black to be white”. We are all aware that racial features play power roles in who gets ahead in the world and who does not. These factors determine who gets hired, who gets convicted and who get elected. We still can not separate these very painful stereotypes of colorism from misogyny, mostly because of the fundamental fact that light skinned blacks heritage in the US stems from the practice of sexual slavery, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation in American Slavery. Because so many slave owners were having offspring that were still considered slaves, rules such as the One Drop Rule were put into place. The One Drop Rule stated that if even one of distant relative was black, you were black, or at the very least “definitely not white”.

There seems to be this notion that a light skinned black is somehow not black, but at the same time they are not white? So what are they? I have been told many times that I have to refer to myself as mixed, I’m not allowed to identify as black, but that I have to refer to myself as bi-racial. Yes, I am bi-racial, meaning i am 2 races, black and white, I am both, and at the same time neither. When it comes to mixed black individuals they are looked down on by those that, don’t suffer the same plight as, but understand the harsh situation because they suffer their in the own way. There seems to be this century long pissing contest to see who will win the most oppressed Olympics and its disheartening to see that after all theses years we as a community can not word to dismantle this internalized racism.

Dark skinned black folx and light skinned black folx do not suffer in the same ways, but they should acknowledge the suffering of each other. The more we a divided among ourselves the harder it is going to be for us to actual heal, and grow. We as a whole need to work together to dismantle colorism before it destroys us.

The following are ways that we can work to dismantle colorism:

1. SELF: Do you show preference? Do you assign hierarchy to skin tone?

Work on your own self hate

Be mindful of your reactions

Take pride in people that look like you

Mourn how you have been treated

Acknowledge your privilege

2. Family, Infant & Colorist Language

Do not make comments on your infants hair texture. Refrain from comments like “I hope their hair isn’t nappy” or “I hope you get your moms straight hair”

Do not make comments about your infants nose. A large nose is seen as “too African”. There have been studies that have shown mothers pinching the bridge of their babies nose in order to make it smaller.

It is a well ingrained belief that the ears, knuckles and knees are the areas that are strong indicators of how dark your child will turn out. “I hope he doesn’t get too dark“

3. Family & Colorist Language:

We can actively check the members of our family for their use of colorist language. “My sister is beautiful the way she is. Saying she is pretty for a dark skinned girl is hurtful”, “Kinky hair is great hair. Texture is normal. White/Latin/Asian parents, do not lose your composure when doing your child’s hair. Watch some tutorials if you are struggling. Speak up and protect even if you are scared you will meet resistance.

4. Men. Black men have no idea how painful it is to men and women when they scan a room and make it obvious that their choices are based on colorism.

Acknowledge your privilege in this area. Men carry the bulk of the power in maintaining colorism inside the community. No matter how many times the womanists may clap back, most black women who want a black man as a lover/life partner/husband, seek to be considered desirable to the men in their culture. The rejection by men because of the womans’ hue is most painful. While it is not fair that colorism was handed down to men, a contribution towards dismantling it will go a long way - for generations to come. Avoidance of a woman for the concern of how the children will come out is akin to eugenics.

5. Church If possible, ask the pastor if you can read these solutions to the congregation.

6. Young Children

Control the TV to the best of your ability for your younger children so that they don’t internalize colorist messages. Small children are impacted by pictures more than words. Images on TV permeate so powerfully tot he point that black children continue to view a white person’s image as superior to that of a black person’s image.

7. Children

Teach boys not to assign girls value based on color hierarchy. Girls are more like to be on the receiving end of being permanently placed on colorist base hierarchy.

Teach girls not to make fun of dark skinned boys. We cannot afford anymore Tommy Sotomayors. We owe it to the next generation.

Teach boys and girls about colorism and how to not use colorist language.

8. Rich Black Hollywood/Alanta

They have the power and money to produce films and cast any way they wish. Let them know that there is no need to pander and beg for casting and EGAT awards. Produce and lead. Issa Rae has already demonstrated that content is king, no matter the medium

9. Employment

Employment law is indeed on the side of stamping out colorism. It can’t be denied that lawsuits are correcting colorism in the workplace. Nothing can put cooperate America in its place more than a lawsuit. It’s well known that companies actually have to abide by protected class laws and protect black people from discrimination experienced in the workplace not only from white people but also from black people.

“In short, radical protest through calling out the perpetrators of colorism is necessary. We may lose some friendships but it will be worth it for subsequent generations to not being raised with self-revulsion and to heal. We need to do this in order to better our communities and ourselves.” - Suzanne Forbes-Vierling

#racism #black women #black men #colorism #Mental Health #Social Justice #Black Lives Matter #psa #podcast

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cavehags · 7 years

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i didn't realize veronica was so high up on your list of characters to make gay. tell me about gay veronica.

maokay wow, so apparently i had a lot to say about this even though this is literally my first time putting all my thoughts together on the issue. veronica mars being straight makes no goddamn sense at all in my opinion for three reasons: trope symmetry, plot and characterization. i’m gonna talk mainly about the way the show would be better if she was gay, but toward the end i’ll talk a bit about coding and how she pretty much looks gay already.

trope symmetry - this is the most obvious part so i’ll get it out of the way: obviously the noir trope in which a detective becomes obsessed with uncovering a loved one’s killer usually happens when the victim is the detective’s wife or girlfriend. in male-driven noir it’s of course a misogynist trope that reduces a woman’s entire life to just what she meant to the male protagonist, but i think it is appropriate to adopt for veronica.

looking at veronica’s other canon friendships after lilly, we mainly have wallace, mac, weevil and meg, and none of these friendships come close to being as intimate as what we see of veronica and lilly together in flashbacks. they share clothes and change in front of each other, talk about feelings (which is big for veronica! she doesn’t like to do that!), etc. having them simply be best friends is there for the “no homo” of it all, but the degree of veronica’s loss - and a more poignant demonstration of why she feels like she’s a changed person after losing lilly - is best illustrated if they were girlfriends. there’s also the fact that, like many male noir heroes, she has a cynical attitude toward love. you could attribute this to a combination of her parents’ separation and the fact that the entire PI industry is founded on untrusting relationships, but i think a part of her did believe in love and now is convinced she can never have it again. veronica believes that loss makes her smarter and more sophisticated; extracting herself from the 09er clique and seeing it from the outside completely changed her perspective on how they treat people. i think losing lilly felt like a wake-up call to her that showed her that she doesn’t get to have romantic love (which might in turn explain her going on to date men for a while despite not really liking them).

plot

first, we can all agree duncan was a bad character and didn’t need to exist. (i mean at least i think that’s a common opinion. people hate him, right?) veronica entering the 09ers’ world because she was dating duncan is a fine way to set up her friendship with lilly and her falling-out from the 09er scene but a better way to establish this, imo, is if she was dating lilly, and they became the first popular 09ers to be out in a gay relationship. in this alternate scenario, lilly is so well-liked that people generally keep their comments to themselves around her and veronica while they’re together (even though, you know, the 09ers are awful and absolutely gossip about it behind lilly and veronica’s backs), but then lilly dies, veronica withdraws from the social circle completely, and the 09ers come to hate her not just because she’s poor and because of her dad’s investigation of the kanes, but also because the gay thing never sat right with them to begin with and they’re glad to not have to pretend to be okay with it anymore.

moving forward from there, the show spends a lot of time illustrating the 09ers’ prejudices, mainly based on race and class. seeing the 09ers’ from the perspective of veronica, an outsider who is very critical of their social structure and the way they treat people, allows the show to treat those prejudices frankly and really hammer the point that privileged and wealthy people are often pretty intolerant in the name of being protective of their own power. (the episode about “pirate points” springs to mind as an obvious demonstration.) we see moment after moment in which veronica is shown to “know better” than the intolerant, ignorant attitude that some 09er or another is spouting. that’s great and makes her a trustworthy character, but in an ideal world, we would be seeing this from the perspective of a character who isn’t just poor, but also a) gay and b) a woman of color to avoid her falling into a “white savior” trope and more fully explain her awareness of subtle demonstrations of intolerance. in many episodes, being on the receiving end of misogyny and classism gives veronica an “in” to exploit those prejudices or pick up on clues that help her with her detective work; it follows from there that the more that people overlook her for various aspects of her identity, the more attuned and capable she is as a detective.

(to sidebar for a second while i’m here, i really love kristen bell in the role, but veronica being white is kind of a cop-out, isn’t it? she is a low-income kid from southern california who has to prove herself ten times more than her rich white peers to get a fraction of the respect - i just feel like it makes no sense for her to be white either. i mean, this was 2004 on the CW and the whole thing was supposed to seize on the popularity of pretty blonde girls doing masculine things a la buffy, so what do you expect, but anyway.)

character

gay coded veronica is the best way to explain her “outsider” status in neptune and the way she proceeds in relationships. i already mentioned that veronica is excluded and tormented for things she has no control and that enduring this harrassment taught her cynicism and independence. we’re led to believe that this is part of the reason why she is really reluctant to go “all-in” romantically. early on in her relationship with max greenfield’s character, things get awkward when he starts to like her more but veronica is pretty much using him for access to police files. this is a classic closeted relationship in which veronica simply isn’t on the same page as he is romantically, but she’s getting something out of the relationship anyway (the kane files) so she sustains it. it’s worth examining the fact that her other relationships are often defined by the fact that the guys are closer to being ready to commit than she is. this is a completely unusual dynamic for a female character and it is certainly explained by her history, but it is much better explained if she’s not attracted to men. it’s also worth pointing out that many of veronica’s defining traits - her independence, her casual feminism (she doesn’t always get it right, sorry susan knight, but she tries), her empathy for other marginalized people - are pretty closely associated with lesbian stereotypes too. and with her perceptiveness and intelligence veronica would absolutely kill in the lesbian dating scene wherever she went on to live and would be the absolute queen of good gaydar and avoiding getting sucked into a uhaul scenario. the end

#this was........... much longer than i thought it would be????#i'm really embarrassed #dancesong17 #ask

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lodelss · 5 years

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The Martha Stewarting of Powerful Women

Ann Foster | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)

On March 5th, 2004, Martha Stewart was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. At the time, she was one of comparatively few female CEOs, and she was irrevocably tied to her company’s success: her smiling, serene, WASPy perfection thoroughly entwined with her company’s numerous ventures. When she first faced charges of insider trading, news media and the general population reacted with schadenfreude, or as one New York Times article coined it, blondenfreude: “the glee felt when a rich, powerful, and fair-haired business woman stumbles.” And stumble she did: In the wake of the scandal, Stewart voluntarily removed herself from most of her roles at the company, and as part of her sentencing she was barred from involvement with the empire for five years. Stewart re-joined the Board of Directors in 2011, but the company never truly bounced back from effects of the scandal.

The Times named Stewart’s conviction among the 20 most notable cases of insider trading, and she is both the only woman charged on the list, as well as the person whose alleged financial gains amounted to the least ($51,000), drastically less than the millions — and cumulative billions — of dollars taken by the men on the list, including Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron. Samuel D. Waksal, founder of ImClone, the stock Stewart was alleged to have illegally sold shares from, pled guilty to orchestrating stock trades and was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison. Yet, it’s Stewart who would become the lead character in two made-for-TV movies — Waksal’s role in each is found much further down the call sheet.

There are countless other instances of men investigated for stock fraud at a similar level to Stewart’s alleged actions, and most of these men were not charged. Stewart was both investigated more ruthlessly than many of her male counterparts and she was also publicly shamed in a way men were never subjected to. In the end, the Department of Justice charges against Stewart for criminal securities fraud were thrown out, and a civil insider trading case the Securities Exchange Commission brought against her was settled. Crucially, neither of these alleged misdeeds were what ultimately landed her in prison. She was charged and found guilty of lying to investigators in an attempt to cover up her lack of insider trading: Yes, guilty for trying to cover up a crime she hadn’t committed in the first place.

When news broke that she would face five months of jail time, it was greeted with delight by late-night TV show hosts, the news media, and seemingly most of the nation. Her case was covered more in the media than the concurrent investigation and trial of Lay by a vast margin, as coverage of Stewart dominated business, entertainment, home, lifestyle, and even some sports sections of newspapers. Between November 2003 and May 2004, the time period of Stewart’s trial and the Lay investigation, New York–based magazines featured Stewart in 1,507 articles; Lay, in just 12. Though Stewart was more of a celebrity than Lay, he had clear ties to then-President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as other high-ranking political officials. A scandal could have been made of his connections, but clearly that wasn’t as appealing to readers as minute-by-minute reporting on Stewart’s downfall.

Media coverage during Stewart’s investigation and trial was derisive, mocking the traditional feminine aspects of her empire as well as deriding her alleged “diva” behavior. This misogynistic treatment — both of her facing charges for lesser actions than men who never went to trial, and for the delight and nonstop news coverage of her trial and sentencing — would become the standard for treatment of formerly powerful women in the midst of a downfall. Let’s call it the Martha Stewarting of powerful women: a single-minded focus on their misdeeds, while countless men doing the same thing avoid the spotlight.

Martha Stewarting is hardly a new phenomenon, but the retrospective understanding of her treatment sets it in a new focus. Women as leaders have been rare throughout Western history, and those who strived to attain positions of power usually did so under designated survivor circumstances: There weren’t any male relatives left to take over the family property, the family land, or the kingdom. Nearly 1,000 years before Stewart’s sentencing, the heir to the throne of England was a 33-year-old woman named Matilda. The nascent country hadn’t encountered this particular designated survivor scenario before. In fact, the concept of a female monarch was so unknown that the word “queen” at that point meant only “the king’s wife.”

Let’s call it the Martha Stewarting of powerful women: a single-minded focus on their misdeeds, while countless men doing the same thing avoid the spotlight.

The rhetoric recorded as she attempted to rally support to take the throne is eerily prescient to the press around today’s female business and political leaders. Matilda battled for the throne against her male cousin for 18 years in a period then known as “the Anarchy.” Chroniclers of the time reported the 12th-century misogyny that prevented her from being able to rule: Matilda’s ambition, and the very concept of a female leader, was seen as unnatural. Her cunning, intelligence, and craftiness was interpreted as shrewishness. She was seen as unsympathetic for not displaying the charm or warmth of her male rival; a woman could never be a ruler, but also, couldn’t she smile more? It was Matilda who settled the Anarchy when she suggested her son take the throne as the new king; the nation, crippled from nearly two decades of war, relented. It would take more than 300 years after her death for Lady Jane Grey to become the next woman to — albeit briefly — sit on the English throne.

Hundreds of years later, our modern society is not too different. Our current equivalent of reigning monarchies, corporations, are overseen by men just as their predecessors held roles as dynastic kings and elected rulers. Most women who ascend to these ranks do so by virtue of family connections, inheriting companies or empires from male relatives or spouses. For a man to fail as a king, president, or CEO through wrongdoings is so commonplace as to be insignificant; in fact, the patriarchal system supports these men as they fall, leaving doors open for them to regain their former level of power. For a woman to ascend to these roles is novel enough, rare enough, that when they display the same fallibility or criminal activity, they dominate the news cycle for months. This when we reach peak Martha Stewarting: the particular schadenfreude expressed at the public shaming of powerful women behaving badly; the way that women who misbehave are treated as representatives for the entire gender and shamed far more than men would be for the same actions.

This double standard is similar to treatment of the mostly female victims of European witch hunts of the 15th to 18th centuries. During this time, approximately 50,000 people were put to death for alleged witchcraft. These were most often women who wielded some level of power and autonomy that caused discomfort to local magistrates. Women in many European countries at this time were not permitted to own property or control their own finances. But women with no male relatives — widows, women without children, spinsters — found ways to make ends meet on their own terms. These women ran their own businesses in fields like midwifery, herbalism, and the sorts of alternative healing popular today among female CEO Gwyneth Paltrow’s fans. The accusations made against these women were often that they had been consorting with the Devil and providing dark magic to their clients. In the Salem witch trials of 1691 and 1692, these women’s property was seized and turned over to the same men who accused and sat in judgment of them. In both the European and American instances, it wasn’t just the alleged witchcraft that led to these women being executed; it was the threat they posed to the patriarchal culture. If women were able to create their own livelihoods, to live outside of a patriarchal society, it threatened the higher status of all men — the notion of a “natural order” with men always in a superior position. Today, powerful women are still eyed suspiciously, though their trial is through the court of public opinion rather than through a Puritan tribunal.

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As rare as it is for an upper-class white woman to reach the level of success to warrant so substantive a fall from grace, it is even rarer for people of color and working-class people to attain. As such, Martha Stewarting happens primarily to wealthy white women, those whose privilege can fool them into believing their gender is a nonissue or even an advantage. That is, until they dare to make a mistake, in which case they become defined entirely by their gender — the invisible misogyny suddenly apparent. There are other double standards affecting people of all marginalized identities’ opportunities for success, in the amount or lack of support they are able to obtain for their careers, and how the media portrays them both when providing exemplary models of humanity and when breaking the law. With very few exceptions, it is wealthy white women who are able to get close enough to white male power to threaten it. And, if they threaten to make white men look foolish for following them, the Martha Stewarting comes on even more strongly as a defense mechanism to protect the woman’s former supporters.

Which brings us to former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. In March 2004, the same month that Stewart was sentenced to prison time, then 19-year-old Holmes dropped out of Stanford to focus entirely on her healthcare startup. As CEO, Holmes stood out not just for her youth and gender but also for her conventional white beauty. Like Stewart, her fresh-faced idealism and awkward persona were enmeshed with the company itself, powering media coverage for her youth and ingenuity as well as for the healthcare disruption she promised. Fifteen years later, she — like Stewart — fell entirely from grace. Holmes’s company went bankrupt and folded, and she is still facing criminal charges.

Her case has not yet been decided, but she has been vilified and pilloried by the media in a similar manner to Stewart: her downfall representing not just her personal failure, but interrogated for what it might mean for any woman who dares to take on a leadership role. Holmes’s passionate speaking style, her widely reported tendency to promise more than she was able to do, and her ability to finesse away detailed questions with braggadocio are textbook behavior for Silicon Valley start-up culture. More start-ups fail than succeed — they have about a 40% success rate. Combined with the small percentage of female-fronted Silicon Valley start-ups (26 percent of the most notable start-ups of 2018 included even one female founder), this means that male-fronted start-ups fail more than those fronted by women. Holmes’s actions, like Stewart’s — and Matilda’s — reignited debate over whether their behavior proved women were inherently unsuited for positions of leadership and power.

Holmes herself has yet to admit culpability to any of the charges she’s faced. As reporter John Carreyrou recounts, Holmes “sees herself as a sort of Joan of Arc who is being persecuted.” The parallels between accused fraudster Holmes and literal Saint Joan of Arc may not be immediately obvious. When Holmes was 19, she left Stanford and began her company. At the same age, 15th-century French peasant Joan was executed for heresy and treason following three years of leading French armies against the English. Yet they may share a similar overall trajectory: Both possessed preternatural levels of personal charisma and a single-minded determination and passion to change the world. And both went from being lauded and adored to becoming pariahs.

Had she failed in her military campaigns, Joan’s story may have been a footnote. But she led the French in a number of campaigns that directly resulted in the coronation of King Charles VII. Under normal circumstances in Joan’s time and place, women were never entrusted with positions of power, let alone consulted on military concerns. A lower-class girl like her should have held even less sway. But Joan claimed to be in direct communication with God, her military ideas and dedication proof positive that he wanted the French dauphin to succeed in battle against the English. The people of France adored her as a heroine, but the defeated English and Burgundian troops refused to accept that they could have been bested by a young woman. They also knew that casting her as a witch and a servant of the Devil would taint King Charles’s validity. Like Martha Stewart, her prosecutors were determined to charge her with something. And so, Joan was arrested and tried for her habit of wearing men’s clothing.

She had worn men’s clothing on the battlefield, and, upon her initial imprisonment in England, continued to dress in this manner in an attempt to prevent sexual assault. While in prison, she was successfully pressured to sign a legal document disavowing her claims to have been acting on God’s orders and included a promise never to wear men’s clothing again. The circumstances upon which she was then found to have worn men’s clothing are unclear — had her captors intentionally removed her women’s clothing in order to force her to break her word and don trousers? Had Joan been forced to choose these clothes due to the ongoing threat of prison rape? Regardless of the reason, Joan is recorded as once again donning men’s clothing, and as such was found guilty of breaking her own promise. Her punishment was to burn at the stake.

By contrast, Elizabeth Holmes has settled fraud charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and has been indicted on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The public’s perception of her remains critical — casting her as either a devious con artist or a wide-eyed naif in over her head. Her alleged choice to intentionally lower her voice has also distracted from her legal battles to make her into a source of pop culture mockery. This vocal styling, like her androgynous presentation, seem — not unlike Joan — to be at least partly deployed in order to obscure her femininity in a male-dominated arena. Holmes is a tall, slender, conventionally attractive young white woman — as rare a Silicon Valley CEO as Joan of Arc was as a 15th-century military leader. Holmes’s affect helped her gain the trust of the male investors she needed to succeed. She was able to attract incredibly powerful male allies and supporters, many of whom continued defending her even as Theranos became exposed as a house of cards.

It is here that, outside of Holmes’s self-identification with Joan, more similarities emerge in the stories of these two women. Both have been vilified by some for their actions to an extent unlikely to befall a man who had performed the same actions; their gender has made them more hated by their accusers and critics. Holmes’s acolytes, like the defeated English nobles facing Joan, refused to accept that they had been bested by a young woman. Ultimately, the men in both instances seem to have determined that the only way this could be true is if the women in question was somehow unnatural. Joan was, therefore, a witch and a heretic. Holmes, a sociopath and a master con artist. These men may have been, in very different ways, defeated by these women, but in retroactively recasting the women as manipulative, the men were allowed to emerge as innocent. The women were both temptress and villain, the men twisting reality to retain their own sense of importance. Twenty-five years after Joan’s execution, Pope Callixtus III declared the charges against her unsubstantiated, naming Joan a martyr. In 1920, Joan was canonized as a Catholic saint, and she is now remembered for her bravery, passion, and commitment to her cause. Perhaps Holmes, whose early success predicated on her passionate declarations of wanting to save lives and improve the world, is hoping to be reconsidered similarly.

Despite strides in American feminism, women are still socialized and groomed to be complacent — we are peacekeepers, subordinate to men’s desires, not raising our voices except to back up what a man has already decided. For a woman to reach a position of power in a patriarchal structure, however, requires her to lean into the game. Traditionally feminine traits like passivity, gentleness, and nurturing will not allow a woman to take a power position. Stewart, always seen as canny and bright, was thought to have betrayed her fanbase when her calculating behind-the-scenes scheming came to light. The sweet-faced Holmes’s leadership style has, post-downfall, been consistently described as bullying. To reach the levels of power of each of these women was to act like a man; facing consequences, they are vilified in a particularly misogynistic manner.

Case in point: Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. The actors were the most famous of the fifty people charged in the college admissions scam dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. Huffman’s lesser charges — and less tabloid-ready family — have allowed her to recede as Loughlin has become the face of privileged overreach. Loughlin and her husband have both pled not guilty, with rumors holding out that their defense will be that this practice is so commonplace neither realized they were breaking the law. Both Huffman and Loughlin have been shown to have made secret payments to admissions consultant Rick Singer; emails have been made publicly available in which both women specifically discuss their actions. Huffman pled guilty, expressing remorse for her actions. It remains to be seen if this will be her defense strategy, and if that will succeed, yet there is truth to the notion that Huffman and Loughlin’s actions are not all that different from those taken by countless wealthy parents. But it’s Loughlin’s face that was featured on tabloid covers and gossip websites. As with Stewart, the dissonance between saintly persona and criminal prosecution was too salacious to resist. When Martha Stewart was released from prison, she expressed her belief that she had been charged and jailed as “an example … that’s it.” Martha Stewarting is not just a woman facing scorn for doing something countless men get away with every day; it’s being charged with these crimes at all.

While Loughlin is best known for her acting roles, she has also been working as a producer on most of her recent TV projects. After cocreating and producing the short-lived primetime soap Summerland, Loughlin took on the role of executive producer on all of her projects for the Hallmark network beginning in 2014. Now part of the 26 percent of female executive producers on television, Loughlin focused on projects that capitalized on her mom-next-door, wholesome vibe. Unlike the more elusive Huffman, who had rarely used her persona to sell her film projects, Loughlin had married her persona to her on-screen presence, as closely as Holmes had married herself to Theranos or Stewart to her eponymous media company. So when Loughlin was charged in Operation Varsity Blues, it affected both her ability to take on acting roles (she was fired from all upcoming Hallmark projects and the final season of Fuller House), as well as her brand as a TV producer. Above all else, the contrast between her persona and her actions led to her own Martha Stewarting: public shaming that focused more on her actions than on those of her 49 co-accused parents, including her husband.

Whatever their culpability, the charges faced by Loughlin, Huffman, Holmes, and Stewart are all backed up by evidence of their actions. Where the double standard comes in is the extent to which they have been publicly shamed for wrongdoing even as countless men have done and will continue to commit similar acts without facing the same consequences. All four women are white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and wealthy, allowing them to thrive in their lanes. However, even these privileges are not enough to protect them from our culture’s glee in watching a powerful woman fall.

The situations faced by these four women represent just one of countless no-win situations for women in our culture. Women are reprimanded for being too fat and too skinny, for being too meek and for being too confident, for failing to report a sexual assault or for bringing attention to one. When money and power enter into the equation, women are chastised for being too dependent on men or for being too much like businessmen. In all scenarios, failure becomes inevitable. The patriarchal system incentivizes greed and allows wealthy people to get away with as much as they do. In order for women to attain power, it must be within this same system, making women as fallible and corruptible as men. Yet the barometer is different for women: “Boys will be boys,” but a woman who is seen to misbehave is immediately condemned by the exact same system she’s leaned into. And it’s the culturally groomed sense of discomfort with women being in power, that it is “unnatural,” that leads to this demonization. We have been living in a false equivalency, pretending as if women can succeed in a man’s world. You can attempt to set aside your gender, like Joan of Arc and Elizabeth Holmes; you can present a sweet face to the public while working ruthlessly behind the scenes, like Martha Stewart and Lori Loughlin; but when you fail, you are nothing more than just a woman.

* * *

Ann Foster is a writer and historian living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her research interest is in the intersection of women, history, and pop culture, especially the lives and stories of figures both well-known and half-forgotten.

Editor: Katie Kosma Factchecker: Ethan Chiel Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

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netflixanthrothings-blog · 5 years

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Born a Crime - YSJ

Trevor Noah is the author of the autobiographical comedy memoir Born a Crime. The title of the book was inspired by the relationship between his black African mother and his white Swiss father, which was legally prohibited by the 1927 “Immorality Act” (Noah, 2016). Born a Crime provides an exemplary blend of sociopolitical analysis as well as a first-hand account of the days under Apartheid rule and its aftermath. The main issues addressed in the book include racism, gender, colonialism, religion, and class. Noah predominantly highlighted the institutional racism experienced by South Africans during the Apartheid era. The author’s purpose of the book is to showcase his perspective as a mixed child under Apartheid, from a micro level of Trevor and his family’s experiences but also from a macro level of forces and powers at work opposing each other.

After the development of Apartheid in 1652, first influenced by the Dutch East India Company (Feinstein, 2005), the system was based on institutionalized racial segregation that installed policies to protect white supremacy, by separating residential areas, educational institutions and places of worships to maintain racial differences (McEwen & Steyn, 2016). In this racial system, it has its own social mobility where the lighter the skin of each race, the more likely that an individual of said race can rise up in the social hierarchy.

Guest (2017) defined culture as a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts and institutions that are created, learned, shared and contested by a group of people. In Soweto families, women were responsible for taking care of the children and cleaning homes whereas men were obligated to be the breadwinner of the family and had to move into the city to look for jobs to feed the family (Noah, 2016). However, under the apartheid state, patriarchy co-existed with colonialism and developed a racial and gendered hierarchy that resulted in segregated employment locations. White men were given managerial jobs and black men were delegated to hard labor such as mining and farming (Jaga et al., 2017). Eventually, structural separation caused their husbands to leave their families permanently. Most women and mothers were left to raise their families alone, and the empty void left by absent men were filled by religion - commonly Christianity. Another element of the black culture in South Africa is the ‘black tax’ which is the curse of being both black and poor (Noah, 2016). Poor black families remain in a vicious cycle which sees them spend all their time and money fixing problems of the past instead of focusing on progressing forward, economically.

Trevor’s mother, Patricia Noah was an independent woman who raised Trevor to know that there were no limits to what he could accomplish. She defied all societal standards and taught her son to survive in a racist society. By doing so, she brought Trevor to places that were common for the whites because she didn’t believe in division among whites and colored was and she wanted his son to see the world beyond the ghetto. Most importantly, she never let oppression define who she was. With the acknowledgment that being a black woman meant being the minorities that were most oppressed and lowest of the social hierarchy, she still fought hard for her son to become more than what society determined him to be. The predominant social ideology would put black people in lower social hierarchy for work, commonly hard labor, whereas Noah disregarded the societal expectations of a black man’s career, and instead used the platform he had as a comedian and political commentator to provide insight and voice out for the extensive issues faced by the black community. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history” (Ulrich, 2007), Patricia was one of the rebellious women that made a small difference in Trevor’s childhood that led him to a successful career that made a substantial impact in the world we live in today.

Ghetto is defined as an impoverished residential area of a city which houses a minority of neighbors who are unemployed, on drugs or in and out of jail (Pattillo, 2003). In his teenage years, Noah grew up in the ghetto - the chaotic yet systematic social hierarchy based on which avenue people lived. Living in the hood, cheese symbolized the rich; the poorer you are the more ghetto you are and the richer you are, the more cheese you are. Crime is not an exception but a norm in the ghetto. The only difference is the type of crime and its severity. The ghetto does not discriminate - it does not exclude its people from the crimes that define it and it does not allow its people to leave it either (Noah, 2016). As an illustration, Noah was not an exception, although he was biracial, growing up in the hood encouraged him to commit crimes, in particularly the CDs and video games he copied and sold.

Colonialism is the implementation of a political coalition that denies its indigenous people equal rights and exploits its nation economically (YPI, 2013). Similarly, colonialism in South Africa created a flawed system of institutionalized racism that made people turn against one another so that the government could overrule and control the people - South Africa went to war itself when Zulu and Xhosa blamed each other for the problem that the whites created.

It shaped the culture of South Africa in which the colonists used the hegemonic aspect of power that people propagandized themselves to believe that interracial marriage was invalid. In relation to the book in the chapter of Go Hitler!, colonial powers never indoctrinated history with emotions or moral dimension to the people in South Africa. Ergo, under no circumstances, they grew to be aware and sensitive on complications such as the impact Hitler had on the world. During one of his DJ sets in a Jewish school, the dancers around him chanted “Go Hitler” repeatedly. Trevor and his crew did not realize that Hitler had a negative connotation to the Jewish because the name ‘Hitler’ in South African culture was to indicate a person with great strength, not the dictator of Germany’s Nazi Party.

In the course of introduction to cultural anthropology, the standpoint of colonialism was the reason race was constructed all over the world. Many colonists during that era theorize that all cultures develop the same approach; where it begins as savage, then barbarian, to cultured. They acknowledged the unilineal cultural evolution and repudiated the historical particularism the nation had. Besides, the course has explored the importance of intersection language and culture, through which the social power of the speaker determines language acceptability.

In the book, he stated “If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.” Colonialism forced the majority of humanity to believe and follow the process of how Westerns developed in their culture, these colonists continuously westernized and Christianized places to go because they think they were helping them for the better. However, they became ethnocentric as they did not justify the history of their culture and judged them as being wrong and barbaric. Moreover, the author stated, “Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.” Language creates an imaginary bond instantly when someone speaks of the same language or accent and it meant that you belonged in that tribe and that you are capable of crossing boundaries, handling situations and navigating the world.

According to Trevor’s purpose, his exploration of culture was comparatively subjective because the insightful memoir strikes in as personal and historical. Noah wrote about his childhood amidst weaving in cultural and political information about the legacy of Apartheid with humor and relayed it in a natural way that made it relatable to the audience. His life in South Africa ingrained him with fearlessness as he discussed the subject of complexities and contradictions of race and how his personal story embodies them. Born a Crime has demonstrated the extreme lengths that black people had gone through to survive the abuse, discrimination, and racism they faced.

Personally, I’ve learned so much more about the history and culture of South Africa that I previously had knowledge on. The stories have shown me the importance of a mother’s role in her child’s life, such as ideologies like to be the man you are today, to never let painful memories hinder you from trying something new, and not conform to rules that are not rational. This book demonstrated the importance of Noah’s relationship with his mother and helped the audience feel what he went through in an emotional aspect which is unlikely to be taught in classrooms. The most important lesson I took away from this book is when Noah stated, “People love to say, “Teach a man how to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime,” but never “And if would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” Minorities all over the world spent their whole lives being discriminated at the bottom of the social hierarchy will never have the opportunity to progress economically or socially because they are never given access to resources or support. I’ve become more aware that I am privileged to not experience oppression daily as the black community.

#born a crime #trevor noah #book review

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