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mmmmm iiiiiiiaiiiiliiiliiaiiliiaiiaiiiaiililiiili 7A NEWS/tStc Cliaclatte ^oat Thursday, April 15, 2004 Afifran itaneilcans Miresde With color issues Continued from page 1A I’m no good if I’m this com plexion.” Omara-Alwala’s complex ion is dark. She was bom in Providence, R.I. to parents from Uganda in East Africa. C. Yvette Taylor, a psychol ogist who counsels many women of color at the University of '^^ginia, and has heard many stories sim ilar to Omara-Alwala’s, says stereotypes based on color are not unusual. “Certainly they still exist and they are age old,” she says. “And they very likely will always be around. And the ramifications of them are myriad. Lots of people - women and men — struggle with the skin-tone issue.” Taylor argues that light skinned African-Americans are favored because they more closely resemble the white majority in the U.S., which is depicted as the paragon of beauty in pho tographs, television commer cials and popular culture. She also traces it back to slavery and the favoritism the master showed toward light-skin slaves, some of whom he had sexually exploited against their will. “That is one theory as to the origin of it, the tviisted mind of an evil white man who just wanted to separate and divide the black race so tiiat we were pitted against one another as opposed to working collectively together to overcome,” Taylor says. Books, such as Delores Phillips’ “Darkest Child,” published earlier this year, addresses the issue of preju dice among people who have been the object of prejudice for years. She observes, “Attitudes of prejudice have been adopted by its victims. And the resulting struggle of those who are darker com plected is a struggle, not ordy against outsiders, but against the closest of kin.” - Omara-Alwala knows about that struggle. “I can’t remember the first remark ever made, out I can remember the snickering, the pointing,” she says. She recalls an instance when she was in the sixth grade at Matoaca Middle School in Chesterdield Coimty, Va. “I would get on the school bus and I would try to find a place to sit,” she recalls, slowly. “It wasn’t like I could n’t sit next to anybody, but if I tried to they would be like, ‘No, this seat’s taken.’ Or, ‘No, you can’t sit here.’ Eventually, some white kid would feel so bad for me that he or she would just let me sit next to them.” That was mild, compared to some of the other insults she faced. “There was a [Ught-skin black] kid sitting by himself and I sat down. He picked his leg up and took his foot and like pushed me. I remember his foot against my back and he pushed me into the aisle. I didn’t know what to do and everybody was like, laughing at me at this point. And the bus dri ver was saying, Tm not leav ing until she sits down.’ “I found another place and I think at this point, one of the kids saw me coming. He kind of acted like I was the creature from the Black Lagoon, for lack of a better phrase. And he jumped over the back of the bus seat into the next seat. And every body’s like laughing and screaming and it’s like the biggest joke ever and I sat by myself This was on my way to school. This was like the . start of my day every day.” With her voice almost' cracking, she says, “I cried for the longest time.” After a string of similar incidents that followed her to college, Omara-Alwala eventually sought profes sional counseling. Sanfra Cox, director of the Coalition of Mental Health Professionals in Los Angeles, says the perceptions of African-Americans of them selves has changed little since the studies of husband and wife team, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, founders of the Norlhside Center for Child Development in Harlem. They conducted an experiment in which black kids were offered the choice between a black doll and a white one. Invariably, the children selected the white one. “Nothing has changed among African-American people. You give a kid a doll in 2004, you’d find the same thing that Kenneth and Mamie Clark found over 50 years ago. In fact, it’s proba bly worse.” She explains, “All you have to do is pick up Ebony and Jet or Essence or any of those magazines that appeal to African-American people, specifically women. Youll see it as clear as it was over 50 years ago. We are doing everything to not look African and to look as white as we possibly can.” Not Danielle Smith, a dark-skin cashier for a national grocery chain, in Washington, D.C. Customers in her check out line can also check out the “Black & Beautiful” tat too that she wears proudly on her wrist. “I was always self-con scious of my complexion when I was younger,” Smith says. “Everybody wanted to talk to light-skin girls and they called me, ‘Black girl’ or made little names to make fun. 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