I barely recognized the elderly woman in the grocery store, and she had only the vaguest clue who I was.
"You're Aaron Seate, aren't you?" she said with a look of curiosity and puzzlement. A friend of my family's from decades ago, she'd confused me with my older brother, a man whom I've out-eaten to the tune of about 80 pounds and four inches in height. He's also a few shades lighter than I.
"Oh, yes," she replied when I relayed this information, "he was the handsome, fair-skinned one with the good hair."
That stung.
"Good hair" is one of those old terms held over from slavery days, one that hue-obsessed black people use to define hair that's straight and wavy. Like a white person's hair. What, in contrast, was "bad hair" supposed to mean, anyway⢠Does nappy hair engage in car-jackings late at night and forget to make child support payments to his baby's mamma?
It might be one of the most closely guarded secrets in the African-American community, but we have been known to discriminate against each other over skin color. We might yell and preach and holler and protest and march against white folks when they try to define us by our hides, but for black people of certain generations, you pretty much are the skin you wear.
Talking with older black people like my friend in the supermarket reveals a deep vein of self-loathing and a desperate need to assimilate visually into a world where fair skin means going through life with a slight aesthetic advantage. In pre-emancipation America, the slaves who bore the fewest African features and physical traits were chosen by the plantation owners for the cushiest jobs. Nannies, coachmen and domestic duties might not be easy jobs by today's standards, but compared to the rest of slave life, they were cake assignments.
The main qualification for those appointments generally was an appearance that would not offend or startle the white master's family and visitors.
Because those house jobs required access to a certain level of education and instruction in decorum, there arose a caste system, with the uneducated and uncultured field slaves at the bottom. The closer you were to massa, the better off you were. Good clothes. A good education. Good hair, so to speak.
As a race, we should be ashamed to still have not thrown off this habit of defining ourselves by other people's ideals. But here we are, a century and a half after emancipation, still judging each other by our similarities to white folks.
It's not just 70-somethings who are caught up in the Skin Shades Sweepstakes. Until very recently, black social organizations, and even college fraternities and sororities separated themselves according to their shades of brownness. A few years back, local historian and former Pittsburgh Courier editor Frank Bolden related some chilling tales about a "paper bag test" used by the Hill District's black social organizations during the 1940s and '50s. Prospective members whose skin color was lighter than a grocery store's brown paper bag were admitted; darker applicants could hit the road.
Even today, it's impossible to watch a rap music video, a movie or a black TV sitcom where the black man's love interest is not a light-skinned black woman with "good hair."
Like most African-American families, my own clan has its share of stories about self-imposed color lines, of relatives who ceased speaking to each other over the skin tones of a selected spouse, and of children repeatedly left off invitation lists for being "too African-looking."
It's a shame we still feel the need to define ourselves this way, even after the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s was supposed to have buried this kind of self-hate for good. It's a shame I couldn't catch up with my friend in the grocery store to tell her the news: There's no such thing as good hair.
Only bad ideas.
