Don't Play in the Sun by Marita Golden

Author:Marita Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425607
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

During a 1999 story for “48 Hours” on a teenager in jail, Goldberg says, a New York producer asked his field producer, “What is she?” “She’s black,” the producer told his boss in New York, “but she’s light-skinned.” He felt he had to say that to get the okay to proceed with the story.

—FROM “EX-CORRESPONDENT LETS LOOSE IN BOOK ON CBS,” WASHINGTON POST

For the dark-skinned black woman it comes as a series of disappointments and embarrassments that the wives of virtually all black leaders (including Marcus Garvey) appear to have been chosen for the nearness of their complexions to white alone. . . . Because it is apparent that though they may have consciously affirmed blackness in the abstract and for others, for themselves light remained right.

—ALICE WALKER

For Browder, the 2001 release of the album Acoustic Soul by singer India. Arie marks a watershed moment in entertainment and social history. “The album is so important because it’s clearly a response to the crazy world that the music videos present and their harmful effects. The album gives me hope. Whenever the pendulum swings so far in one direction, there’s got to be a reaction.”

The day that I first heard India. Arie’s song “Video” began with a conversation about color. That morning I visited my adult stepdaughter and as we talked, sitting on her bed, BET offered up a sample of video hits by Black hip-hop and rap stars. I commented on the absence of brown or dark-skinned girls in the videos, and Keesha shared with me her disillusionment with much of what she saw on the video jukeboxes for that reason. Then she told me that there was a new song and video out by a singer named India. Arie. It was a video, she assured me, that I would like. “The next time it’s played, I’ll give you a call so you can see it,” she promised.

Later that evening Keesha called me and said simply, “Turn to Rap City. They’re playing the video I told you about.”

In a sea of videos that featured images of Black violence, grotesqueness, confusion, Black female singers bragging about their sexual exploits, comparing themselves to whores, darker-skinned Black women as the object of degradation, row after row of long-haired, light-skinned model types, Asian and Latina and White girls draped over the gold-swathed Black rapper—into this madness stepped India. Arie singing an entirely different tune. Arie, tall, lanky, dark, broad-nosed and dreadlocked, presented an alternate image of beauty, a black one that was African inspired.

Arie deconstructs traditional video mythology with an anthem of her own called “Video,” which asserts, “I’m not the average girl from your video / And I ain’t built like a supermodel / But I learned to love myself unconditionally / Because I am a queen / I’m not the average girl from your video / My worth is not determined by the price of my clothes . . . / When I look in the mirror the only one there is me

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