When I went to Dakar, Senegal, I didn’t expect to merge into the culture. I knew something would remind me that I am an African American, not an African.

I didn’t expect that something would be eye shadow.

It happened on the first weekend. I stood in the door of my guest house, watching people headed to a wedding reception on the roof. It was easy to tell who had organized the affair. A group of women wore identical hot pink cotton blouses and skirts sewn in the traditional Senegalese style. They had coordinated their makeup, too. Their eye shadow and even their lipstick were as pink as their clothes.

I was stunned. In America, black women don’t wear colors like that.

We wear earth tones, deep golds and coppers, maybe a silver occasionally as a highlight. We outline our eyes with a black or brown pencil, or perhaps navy-blue if we’re adventurous. But bright pastels aren’t our colors. They belong to the white women whose skin supposedly provides a better palette for such tints.

So there I stood, an ocean away from home, in a place I hoped would provide a refuge from the burden of race. Instead, I was once again confronting the fact that race colored my most mundane decisions: the makeup I bought, the colors I chose for my clothes.

African Americans have always had an ambivalent relationship with color. We love so-called high-effect hues like red, orange and purple. But Eurocentric society used our affection as proof of our inherent inferiority. They claimed the colors we loved were “loud” and jarring. In a bid for acceptance, many blacks abandoned bright colors for a paler, more acceptable palette.

Both men and women got the message. I’m old enough to remember when my father wouldn’t wear anything red because he was convinced that he was way too dark for such a bright color.

And that is one reason why my own closet is a paint box. I wear warm colors like oranges and peaches, accented with an occasional beige or cream. My blouses and dresses do more than compliment my complexion. They symbolize my insistence that I will not compromise my identity in order to fit into a society that, quite frankly, views people like me with disdain.

The Senegalese women, however, were much less self-conscious than I. No one had told them that certain shades of eye shadow and make-up should be reserved for whites, or that wearing certain colors confirms and reinforces white society’s stereotypes about blacks.

Why would those issues even come up? White folks are barely a presence in Senegal. During the two weeks I stayed in the Dakar, I could count the whites I saw on one hand. Even the generic images I saw on billboards and in advertisements were of black people.

No, the women I was watching didn’t need the us-them division that had ordered my life. They don’t have to wonder whether the brightness of their clothes or the style of their hair would be used to bar their economic and social progress.

So they wore eye shadow in eye-popping colors: a blue so bright and pure, it seemed to be pulled from the cloudless sky that greeted me each morning; a green that reminded me of the Granny Smith apples I’d bought before I left the United States.

I smiled as I watched these beautiful women running up and down the stairs. Theirs wasn’t a style I would imitate, but it was a point of view I could appreciate.

In that moment, I began to get what I wanted most from my visit to Africa: the freedom of being in a place where nothing seemed to refer to race — not even the make-up.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

Mass communications scholars assert consumers and advertisers are engaged in a never-ending struggle for attention and money. Consumers combat the relentless assault of ads by constructing defenses to protect themselves from unnecessary or even disturbing information. Advertisers’ livelihoods depend on toppling or circumventing those defenses, and they use all sorts of stealth attacks to accomplish that goal.

I just want to explain what’s really going on in the latest “movie” playing at the Amazon.com Theater.

Yes, Amazon.com, that amazing emporium of stuff — books, compact discs, software, watches, musical instruments, and whatever else you think you want — now has a “theater.” You don’t have to pay a cent to watch. Just let your defenses down for the five minutes it takes to see the short feature, which the generous owners of Amazon.com call a “free gift” to its customers.

I beg to disagree. I’ve never paid to receive a gift in my life, so I’m immediately suspicious when a store offers me a “free” gift. Usually that complimentary present is an enticement, a way to get me into the shop so I’ll buy something. So let’s be honest. This film isn’t a gift — it’s not even a film. It’s a commercial starring products that you can purchase at Amazon.com.

Don’t know what the products are? You can wait for the credits; they are listed with hyperlinks to another Amazon page where you can buy them. Can’t wait for even five minutes? Click the credits button. They will roll. You don’t have to be told outright to figure out what’s for sale.  

Watch “Agent Orange,” the second of five movies. Notice how the camera lingers on the orange girl’s watch. See how the cinematographer just happens to build the shot around male actor’s orange tennis shoes.

Notice I didn’t say leading man. There is no reason to wait until the end of the movie to buy the Orange Boy’s shades, or the Orange Girl’s boots. Click another button and you can link to the product on the Amazon.com site.

In these movies, the products are the stars and the actors are the props. The fact that a few live humans get top billing doesn’t prove otherwise; it’s just a ploy to get past one of those filters that we weary consumers use to separate wheat from chaff. Or commercials we want to watch from ones we don’t.

So why am I checking the schedule to see when the next movie will show? Because they are great little flicks.

The first one, “Portrait,” was a sophisticated, witty adaptation of the “Picture of Dorian Gray.” I’d give it two thumbs up. I couldn’t really get into the avant-garde camera angles in “Agent Orange,” so the piece gets one thumb up and one down. But that’s coming from a woman who still has oatmeal colored carpet in her living room. Maybe the flick was too bright for my taste.

Still, I stayed and watched until the end, and that is all the advertisers want me to do. Even though I haven’t bought anything, there are fewer and fewer shopping days until Christmas. I was intrigued enough by the movies to spend a couple of hours writing about them, and a lot longer thinking about them.

So who won this battle?  Mass communications scholars also predict that advertisers will become so adept at sneaking through consumers’ barricades, anything can become a potential commercial.

I think the researchers haven’t gone far enough. The future is here; everything already is a potential commercial. Even columns like this.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

Hours after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, I did what hundreds of thousands of other viewers probably did. I picked up the telephone to urge others to see the movie.

My first call went to my sister, a self-described “Yellow Dog Democrat,” teacher, and activist. I didn’t have to tell her to see the film; I know she’d go as soon as the movie came to her town. But I urged her to take my niece and nephews.

There was something in the film they need to see.

It isn’t filmmaker Michael Moore’s theories about the connections between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family. It isn’t the scenes in the second half, when Marine Corps recruiters try to lure young, under-employed African American males into enlisting.

I want my niece and nephews to see a scene at the beginning of the movie, before the credits, when Moore shows the U.S. Senate certifying the election of President George W. Bush.

One by one, African American members of Congress and their allies stood before the senators to oppose the certification of Bush’s election. They presented written petitions noting how Bush’s victory lay on the disenfranchisement of African American voters. When Vice President Al Gore, who was serving as president of the Senate, asked if any senator supported his or her petitions, each member of the House of Representatives gave the same answer.

“No.”

Why should the young people in my family see such a defeat? My sister thought the scene would teach the importance of electing black officials.

Maybe, but I am hoping for a larger lesson; I want my niece and nephews and their peers see what race consciousness really is.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up for those who have less than you: less education, less access, even less understanding of the machinations that keep the elite in place.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up to oppression, even though your resistance might be futile.

True race consciousness demands speaking truth to power.

Sadly, I think younger blacks don’t often see this kind of moral leadership.

Older black leaders, like Jesse Jackson, have failed them by not practicing what they preach in an age when one’s indiscretions can appear on a website — and the national news — in an instant.

Then there’s Bill Cosby, who castigates the younger generation, as well as the underclass, with vile and stereotypical language.

Their peers, the new class of young celebrities, concentrate on “bling-bling.” I’ll admit the term is probably outdated. But the lyrics to hip-hop I hear still gleefully celebrate sex, flash, and cash. So young people look up to folks touting P. Diddy race consciousness: folks who think they advance the race by showing others how to live fast, glittering lives.

Where were they when the Republicans stole black votes to put their boy in the White House? Sampling beats?

Who where they talking to? Each other?

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, and the others confronted the white, predominately male senators who sat comfortably on their behinds and approved an election that they knew was illegitimate. These were people who hid their cowardice and cynicism behind rules of order.

It would have only taken one senator to sign a petition that could have stopped the process that made Bush the president of the United States.

Not one came forward.

And the representatives knew that before they came to deliver their petitions. But they came anyway.

They welded the power they had even though they knew the final outcome.

And that’s what I want my niece and nephews to see, so that when their turn comes to speak out —and it will — they will not hesitate.

They will remember those who went before them, and stand strong.

STORY INDEX

FILMS >

Fahrenheit 9/11
URL: http://www.fahrenheit911.com

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
URL: http://www.cbcfinc.org

“

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

By the time you read this, maybe we will have seen all the pictures from the Iraqi prison scandal and will not have to endure another shot of a grinning guard sitting on top of a prisoner who is sandwiched between two stretchers.

That’s a hope, not a prediction. Even as he apologized about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned the world that we haven’t seen all the photographs, or even the worst ones.

Still, the images trickling out have been horrific: a naked prisoner down on all fours while a guard holds a leash attached to the man’s neck; a pair of naked prisoners, one with his back to the camera and another seated between the man’s legs in a suggestion of oral sex.

Such images defy words.  

A citizen of Saudi Arabia searched for a way to express his shock and found a parallel in this nation’s history. He reportedly told the New York Times, that the pictures reminded him of photographs from a lynching.

Too harsh?  Go to “Without Sanctuary,” an online exhibit of postcards and photographs collected by James Allen.

Browse through postcard after postcard of smiling, even laughing crowds posed in front of charred bodies hanging from trees. Pause at the photograph of a naked black man standing before the camera documenting the final minutes of his life. His cuffed hands barely cover his genitals. A back view shows the scars and welts from the beating he’d received before his death.

See if you don’t flinch at this picture just the way you have probably flinched at their 21st century descendants from Abu Ghraib.

True, these aren’t the nods to lynching that have come from the Iraqi war.

We also remember pictures of a huge crowd rejoicing over the burned corpses of four Americans killed in Fallujah.

That photograph replicated many of the images in Allen’s collection. So why didn’t it stun us in the same way as this latest crop of photos?

The reasons rest on who we think we are, and who we really are.

In the Fallujah photographs, the Americans were the victims who died in support of a noble mission: bringing democracy to a Middle Eastern country.

Because we cast ourselves as saviors, we could place that tragedy in a religious context. It reinforced our belief that we, of all nations, always stand on the side of right.

The abuse scandal strips us of that illusion. The American guards are the perpetrators, arguably no better than the minions of Sadaam Hussein. Instead of uplifting a vanquished people, they are humiliating them.

And the guards are enjoying it immensely.

That fact, I think, is one of the most disturbing similarities between the old lynching postcards and the photographs leaked from Iraq.

There is no solemnity, no appreciation for the enormity of the situation captured by the camera. There was no sense that the Americans were engaged in a dirty business.

Instead, the guards are mugging as they point to the prisoners, posing and laughing as if at football game, or hanging out in a bar.

They were having fun. Big fun.

Some analysts have suggested that the snapshots were part of a propaganda war, tools to demoralize the insurgency and demonstrate the power of the American forces.

I’m not buying that. Those pictures were meant for albums and scrapbooks. They were souvenirs, just like the postcard of a “barbecue” — the burning of a black man — held in Tyler, Texas during the early 20th century.

In reflecting on his lynching postcards, James Allen noted that the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator. He insists the photographic art played a role as significant to the lynching ritual as torture was.

He could just as well be talking about the images from Iraq, for they were made with the same intention: to reveal the faces of the enemy and the substance of his villainy.

And they do that. They do that very well.”

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

The more I follow the latest controversies over homosexuality — the furors over same-sex marriage and the consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop — the more I’m convinced that I am watching the latest civil rights struggle.

And the more I’m convinced that the emphasis is going to be on struggle.

Those of us who are geographically distant from events in San Francisco and New Paltz, New York, may be tempted to dismiss the lines at the city halls until they stretch into our town. We have a vague sense that something is happening, but we seem to take the instances as patches of trees, not a forest.

Television and newspaper reports contribute to this view. The events came across like sports stories as journalists tallied the increasing number of couples waiting to wed: first in the tens, the fifties, then the hundreds and thousands. Subsequent events were reported, in turn, with a breathless bit of surprise: it’s happening again, and again, and again …

But we haven’t made the jump to realizing that, in this case, a whole bunch of trees is really a forest. We haven’t put the events together to see them as components of a whole, as components of a movement that is emerging as we watch.

I wonder whether that inability rests on the way Americans have mythologized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That’s the Civil Rights Movement — in capital letters.

Those twenty-odd years of battles for racial equality have been condensed into sets of buzzwords. We talk about “the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,” where four little girls died in Sunday school, or “the first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina,” where four college students first challenged segregated seating at a dime-store lunch counter.

We remember the march from Selma to Montgomery and, of course, the bus boycotts in that same city.

But we don’t talk about the other campaigns, like Albany, Georgia, where the local sheriff successfully outwitted organizers who came to his city.

I’ve seen this first-hand in the civil rights history of my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Most recitations stop in 1960, when a young civil rights protestor, Diane Nash, confronted the mayor on the steps of city hall. Nash asked the mayor point blank whether he believed that segregation was wrong. He paused, swallowed and answered yes.
The tale ends there, as if segregation disappeared in a matter of days. In fact, boycotts, sit-ins — and overt resistance to integration — continued until 1965 when those upholding segregation accepted the inevitable.

This romanticization of the civil rights movement has deceived the generations who did not witness it. They think the movement was a series of brilliant skirmishes instead of a war. They think that a few well-placed assaults, and a nimble charge or two will yield total and lasting victory.

Because America has frozen the civil rights movement in time, we have a distorted view of its methods.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, an organizer for the Nashville campaign, warned about the dangers of that view when he spoke in Nashville on Valentine’s Day.

“Young people feel that if they just get a march together, the walls are supposed to come down. When they don’t, they get upset,” he said during a panel on the methods of the Nashville campaign.

He was reminding his audience that the civil rights struggle demanded preparation and strategizing. Protestors didn’t rush into stores to sit at lunch counters. They practiced, honing their reactions to the abuse they knew they would receive.  That’s why they didn’t flinch when hecklers jammed lighted cigarettes into their arms during sit-ins.

They’d prepared at workshops beforehand.

Rev. Vivian and his contemporaries understood the scope of their struggle. In order to win, they had to destroy entrenched values and beliefs about one’s place in society and in culture. The struggle affected folks on both sides of the protests, because the possible outcome would be the end of the world as everyone knew it.

In its way, the civil rights struggle was an apocalypse. Some welcomed it, and they weren’t all blacks.  Others didn’t, and they weren’t all whites. Those who welcomed it, marshaled their efforts for it. Those who feared it, waged a dogged battle against it.

In the same way, the pictures we’ve seen of a beaming Bishop Robinson in full regalia, hugging his partner and of a lesbian couple embracing, kissing and crying for joy, contest our notions of family and religion.

No matter what we believe, we’re going to grapple with the changes that are bound to come.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

Despite being born in New York and raised in Tennessee, I can say that for most of my life I haven’t felt like an American. My citizenship couldn’t overcome my race. I’m black, a member of the group that has been the quintessential “other” in this country.

Just the names we embraced illustrated our position outside the mainstream. The first Africans came to this country as slaves, who could in some extraordinary cases buy their freedom. Within two generations, though, black skin and bondage had become so intertwined that the word “slave” became a synonym for “black person” by the end of the 17th century. After Emancipation, former slaves and their progeny wore and discarded a host of names: colored, Negro, black. The word American didn’t become part of that designation until the late 1980s, when black leaders lobbied for the term “African American.” Their justification made sense: We could claim both halves of our identity, grabbing hold of the present without rejecting the heritage of the past.

But being something is different from talking about it. I was and am more comfortable with the word black than I am with African American. I like the way the one-syllable word explodes from my lips. At 49, I’m old enough to remember when calling someone black meant a whipping — not a spanking — for a child and a sure enough fight for an adult. I enjoyed the transformation from insult to compliment.

Besides, I just didn’t feel like an American before. However, that’s beginning to change. Although I’m still black (and will be until I die unless something miraculous happens to change my skin color), I am now constantly struck by how American I really am. It’s not because American society has become more accepting of black folks. Something more mundane is motivating my revelation.

I’m shopping, more and more, at ethnic grocery stores.

Nowadays I live in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the old, Midwestern cities that is fighting economic decay. This was a manufacturing town, and that past has left it completely unprepared for a world where factories in Asia make everything so cheaply no American company can compete.

When folks think of Cleveland, they don’t think about diversity. In its heyday — from the early 1900s until the bottom fell out of the manufacturing era in the 1970s — people came from all over the country and the world to work in this region’s factories. Cleveland became a city of Eastern and Western Europeans, Southern blacks and whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Chinese, and Lebanese. Everyone came and set up churches, clubs – and stores. One can eat his or her way around the world without leaving the seven counties that make up the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.

Within a fifteen-minute drive from my house, I can buy palm oil at the Ghanaian market, or cardamom coffee at the Lebanese store. I can stop at the Korean place for a bottle of that extra-hot Vietnamese pepper sauce that my African friends adore. The Indian store sells the brand of loose tea that has replaced those Lipton teabags I bought at chain stores like Tops and Giant Eagle. And the Russian deli sells the chocolate candy I give to kids in the neighborhood.

I shop at these places because they are nearby and they have the things I want. But running into the Indian store isn’t the same as a quick trip to the twenty-four-hour supermarket. In fact, I can’t really run into the Indian market; I walk in slowly. I browse and ponder. The minute I enter one of these little markets I realize I’m an American. While the stores are in America, they are not American places. They are enclaves, a little bit of home for the people who shop there, and a reminder, to me, of where I come from.

These are places to buy hair oil that smells like sandalwood, not like citrus. The chocolate drink on the shelf is Ovaltine, not Nestlé’s Quik.

These are places that carry the frozen goat meat and instant fufu flour that makes home cooking taste authentic, not desperately patched together from substitutions. These are the places where, on the most basic level, the regulars speak the same language: the language of food and life and experiences. When I walk in the door, it’s obvious I don’t belong, but the reason I don’t belong isn’t because I’m black. It’s because I’m American.

Even though I go to the Ghanaian market for a container of palm oil for my peanut butter stew, I unconsciously expect to see bottles of Mazola and cans of Crisco. I know that the Indian store carries jars of ghee, not sticks of butter. Still I habitually walk to the refrigerated food section, not the shelf. These little assumptions and habits betray my identity in a way I can’t control. Yes, I’m black, but I’m a black American. I look at the world the way an American does, craving wide, open spaces and places to expand.

Perhaps that’s why the stores look so tiny to me. We shop at “big-box stores” and “mega-markets” where goods come in cartons and you can buy enough toilet paper to last a year. We want shelves that rise from the floor to the ceiling. We want to choose between ten kinds of whatever we buy because more is better and we want access to as much as we can.

At the ethnic markets, the shelves are sometimes fully stocked and sometimes they aren’t. Sons and daughters tend the cash register; friends stop in to chat with the owner. The stores resemble the corner stores of my youth: intimate places that disappeared when Americans sprawled farther into the suburbs.

But while these stores are quaint to me, they’re more of an excursion than a place to run errands. How can a family-owned shop fight against a superstore that can crush its competitors by staying open twenty-four hours per day, selling food at low prices and marketing to diversity by including an aisle of “ethnic” groceries?

Perhaps the small ethnic shops could market what has been for me an unintended consequence of multiculturalism: They’ve shown me how much I belong, however uneasily, to the mainstream.

And all for the price of a box of tea.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs