{"id":24711,"date":"2012-08-07T22:02:44","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T22:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24711"},"modified":"2012-08-07T22:02:44","modified_gmt":"2012-08-07T22:02:44","slug":"liberating-blackness-the-theme-of-whitening-in-two-colombian-short-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24711","title":{"rendered":"Liberating Blackness: The Theme of Whitening in Two Colombian Short Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Liberating Blackness: The Theme of Whitening in Two Colombian Short Stories<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Callaloo<\/a>
\nVolume 35, Number 2<\/a>, Spring 2012
\npages 475-493
\nDOI: 10.1353\/cal.2012.0074<\/a><\/p>\n

Laurence E. Prescott<\/a><\/strong>, Professor
\nDepartment of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
\nPennsylvania State University<\/em><\/p>\n

Hablar\u00e9 del f\u00edsico de los negros, casi como de carrera. Tienen dos cosas repugnantes para no gustar, el color negro y el mal olor. . . .<\/p>\n

\u2014Pbro. Felipe Salvador Gilii<\/a><\/p>\n

The convert may have found spiritual salvation in the White Man\u2019s faith; he may have acquired the White Man\u2019s culture and learnt to speak his language with the tongue of an angel; he may have become adept in the White Man\u2019s economic technique, and yet it profits him nothing if he has not changed his skin.<\/p>\n

\u2014Arnold Toynbee<\/a><\/p>\n

The premium placed by many Negroes on a light shade of skin, straight hair, and Caucasian features, are all indicative of severely injured self-esteem and of the inferiority assumed in things Negro.<\/p>\n

\u2014Peter Loewenberg<\/a><\/p>\n

And above all, the author must believe in black folk, and in the beauty of black as a color of human skin.<\/p>\n

\u2014W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Black Skin, White Masks<\/a><\/em>, a probing psychological exploration of the dynamics of racism and its effects on both Blacks and Whites, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon<\/a> writes: \u201cIn the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his body schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty\u201d (110\u2013111). As Fanon goes on to say, the equating of blackness with evil and ugliness stimulated white scientists to seek a means of removing \u201cthe burden of that corporeal malediction\u201d (111). Simultaneously, that same malevolent identification prompted black people to go to extraordinary lengths to free themselves from their blackness, the alleged source of their discontent. Skin lighteners, hair straighteners, miscegenation<\/a>, and \u201cpassing<\/a>\u201d are some of the more common methods that have been tried over the years. These preoccupations have not gone unnoticed by creative writers. In 1931 African American journalist and writer George S. Schuyler<\/a> (1895\u20131977) published the humorously satirical novel Black No More<\/a><\/em>, in which a black doctor discovers a process that changes black skin to white and transforms Negroid features to Caucasian in a matter of hours, thereby disrupting the racial status quo, bolstering the defenders of white racial purity and supremacy, and ruining black businesses and civil rights organizations.<\/p>\n

Schuyler\u2019s novel is probably the best-known African American work of fiction that deals with a physical transformation of black people to bring about group liberation and a \u201chappy\u201d resolution of \u201cthe race problem.\u201d The theme and pursuit of whitening, however, is not confined to North American society and literature. It is also present in the cultures and literary and non-literary works of Latin America. Indeed, in the nation of Colombia<\/a>, South America, whose citizens of African descent constitute a significant portion of the total population, both journalists and creative writers have shown a continuing interest in the physical whitening of black peoples. As early as 1883, for example, there appeared in the \u201cFolletines\u201d supplement of the Bogot\u00e1<\/a> newspaper La Luz<\/em>, a notice titled \u201cNo m\u00e1s negros\u201d \u2018No more Blacks,\u2019 which reported on a doctor in South Carolina<\/a> who was experimenting with \u201cuna agua milagrosa que da \u00e1 la piel de los negros la blancura de la nieve\u201d \u2018a miraculous water which gives to Negroes\u2019 skin the whiteness of snow.\u2019 Lacking official confirmation of the extraordinary liquid, the authors of the note, associating the word \u201canti-negro\u201d with \u201cantidote,\u201d wryly concluded: \u201cHasta que as\u00ed sea y sepamos \u00e1 qu\u00e9 atenernos, confesamos que el anti-negro nos parece un white lie\u201d \u2018Until it is so and we know on what to rely, we confess that the anti-black seems to us a white lie.\u2019 Noteworthy, too, is the presence in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century publications of advertisements directed at women for products that lighten\u2014and (thus) allegedly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Liberating Blackness: The Theme of Whitening in Two Colombian Short Stories Callaloo Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2012 pages 475-493 DOI: 10.1353\/cal.2012.0074 Laurence E. Prescott, Professor Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese Pennsylvania State University Hablar\u00e9 del f\u00edsico de los negros, casi como de carrera. Tienen dos cosas repugnantes para no gustar, el color negro […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,1196,8],"tags":[4284,1865,11520,11522,11521],"class_list":["post-24711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-callaloo","tag-colombia","tag-laurence-e-prescott","tag-laurence-emmanuel-prescott","tag-laurence-prescott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}