{"id":34711,"date":"2013-11-13T16:37:52","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T16:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=34711"},"modified":"2017-03-07T19:14:16","modified_gmt":"2017-03-07T19:14:16","slug":"being-black-its-not-the-skin-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=34711","title":{"rendered":"Being Black: It’s not the skin color"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being Black: It’s not the skin color<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Philadelphia Weekly<\/a>
\n2013-11-13<\/p>\n

Kennedy Allen et al.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Drexel prof Yaba Blay’s<\/a> striking new photo book “One Drop<\/a>” explores how a wide range of different skin tones affects Americans’ personal identities. In\u00a0\u00a0this PW excerpt, eight Philadelphia-area residents of mixed heritage concur: However light they may be, they’re still most certainly Black. Our own Kennedy Allen agrees…<\/em><\/p>\n

Growing up in Mt. Airy<\/a>, an ethnic and economically diverse neighborhood, instilled within me a level of acceptance and tolerance regarding my fellow man that, confoundingly, many didn\u2019t seem to share. I was one of seven Black kids in a class of 42. Because I spoke English properly and preferred rock to rap, I was deemed \u201cWhite girl\u201d by my racial peers\u2014a label that haunted me for what felt like eons. I knew I wasn\u2019t White, nor did I ever have the urge to be, outside of wishing my hair would blow in the wind like some of the girls in my class. Flash-forward to my final years of high school, in a black school where I was the \u201clight-bright girl who talks White.\u201d Dark-skinned people still sneer at me, somehow assuming that I believe myself to be \u201cbetter\u201d than they are because of my buttered-toffee skin tone.<\/p>\n

When all is said and done, racial or ethnic identity rests upon the individual and their experiences. I identify myself as a black woman who happens to have Irish and Cherokee lineage.<\/strong> What of all the others who identify as black, but appear otherwise? Scholar and activist Arturo Schomburg<\/a>, whose extensive collection of books and historical records of African people\u2019s achievements eventually became the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture<\/a> in Harlem, N.Y.<\/a>, identified as an Afro-Puerto Rican. (In fact, his passion for gathering all those documents was born after a grade-school teacher told him that black people had no history, heroes or accomplishments.) Would Schomburg\u2019s experience be less valid because it fails to meet some homogenous notion of Blackness? Who has the right to determine these standards in the first place? And in an age of global interconnectedness and the instant, worldwide exchange of information and ideals, why does it still even matter?<\/p>\n

Dr. Yaba Blay<\/a> wondered some of the same things. A first-generation Ghanian-American and the co-director of Drexel\u2019s Africana studies program, Blay has spent the past two years gathering vibrant portraits and intimate stories from nearly 60 individuals across the country in an attempt to shine some light upon questions of racial ambiguity and legitimacy. Those portraits now comprise a new book that she\u2019s edited and published, (1<\/span>)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race<\/a><\/em>\u2014as well as an exhibit of the same name, currently on display at the Painted Bride Art Center<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article and eight subject profiles from the book here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drexel prof Yaba Blay’s striking new photo book “One Drop” explores how a wide range of different skin tones affects Americans’ personal identities. In\u00a0\u00a0this PW excerpt, eight Philadelphia-area residents of mixed heritage concur: However light they may be, they’re still most certainly Black. Our own Kennedy Allen agrees…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,395,125,8,394,20],"tags":[16352,16351,16354,13177,16355,16349,8015,16353,4889,16356,4888,16348,147,16350,7993,3343,7992],"class_list":["post-34711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-autobiography","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-anita-persaud-holland","tag-brandon-stanford","tag-c-b-cloud","tag-danielle-ayers","tag-joanne-stewart","tag-kennedy-allen","tag-noelle-theard","tag-nuala-cabral","tag-pennsylvania","tag-perry-vision-divirgilio","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-weekly","tag-photography","tag-sean-gethers","tag-yaba-a-blay","tag-yaba-amgborale-blay","tag-yaba-blay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34711","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=34711"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52199,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34711\/revisions\/52199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}