Black is beautiful, yes it is!

(photo courtesy Dum Spiro Spero, http://elventryst.blogspot.com)

As I sit in my home in Trinidad, soaking up the sun, chowin down on some amazing food and being spoiled by my family, I’ve had a lot of time to ponder about life, and the world I live in, and what it all really means.  It’s been a fun trip but it’s also been one of soul-searching, and coming to terms with my home, my past, my present and my future.  So, sorry I’ve become lazy with the posting again – if you were in a 40 degree climate with bright blue skies, beautiful people and delicious food, I know you would too.  I beg your forgiveness. “Doh beat meh!”

Over the past few days, I’ve been a real sponge, keeping up with my international news as usual, but also rediscovering my home and my legacy.  My return to Trinidad has yielded some great finds and some not-so-great finds.  I’ve reconnected with great friends and my loving family, but I’ve also noticed that Trinidad, never one to be caught dead without “the latest,” has been experiencing some intense racial issues.  I find myself questioning whether or not I was cognizant of it before, whether I was blissfully ignorant, or whether this is some kinda regression into an ugly racial past that it shares with most of the world.  As a result, I’ve become more in touch with my blackness, that part of me that is undeniably black and refuses to let the ugly I hear in the world affect my sense of pride.  Black, my dears, it seems, is no longer considered beautiful.

Gone is our heyday, that precious stretch of time in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when we just woke up as a race and said, simply, “enough.”  There was a time when it was cool to eschew the damaging chemical relaxers and skin whintening creams, a time where we all danced and sang “Say it loud! I’m BLACK and I’m PROUD!”  Instead, it has been replaced by a fragmented pride – we’re still divided, we still have our detractors that exist within our own race, and yet we still have those who love us, our legacy, the contributions we’ve made to this world, and all the good that we do.  But, the good doesn’t sell papers and doesn’t get press (well, except for, you-kn0w-who).

So, after a morning of reading this article in The Washington Post, about Chinese views of black people, the colour of our skin (which still seems to bother so many of us in this world, including us), our legacy and the fact that many in this world consider everything about us ugly, I have been a bit down.  Because of all the turmoil going on in the world right now, the fact that money has disappeared and countries are now in a power struggle to rule supreme on this planet … well, racism is able to rear its ugly head again and can now go, for the most part, unchecked.  And while I hate racism in general, with every fibre of my being, nothing hurts more than hearing awful things about my own race.  Call me a softie, but it genuinely hurts, and  I take it personally.

But then, I stopped by my new favourite mag’s website, Au Courant Magazine, and saw that they had posted the video I’ve embedded below.  It is the late great designer and couturier Yves Saint Laurent, waxing philosophical about black models.  Any black woman (or man!) who wants to call themselves a fashionista must surely know about the long struggle our race has had within the industry, especially where the use of black models is concerned.  ”They don’t sell.”  ”They’re not as marketable as white models.”  And, my favourite, “they’re not pretty enough.”  Smh.

Watch how, simply and with a quiet dignity that he always made part of his public persona, Yves Saint-Laurent praises us.  It made me smile.  It uplifted me, and I hope it does the same for you.  And those glasses, they’re back in, and I’m due for a new pair.

So, now, when I hear the awful things, and I witness the ugly, and I read articles about ignorance and lines like “black people, especially Africans, are not clean enough” (see Washington Post article) … well, I can ignore it all.  I can tune it out.  I can focus on YSL, and Grace Jones, Barack Obama, Michael Lee Chin, my own mother, Duro Olowu, Tracie Thoms, Benjamin Banneker, George Washington Carver, Dr Eric Williams, Martin Luther King, Rebecca Cole, Oprah, Chris Rock, Kofi Annan, Naomi Campbell, Jay-Z, Rosa Parks, Ozwald Boateng, the Williams sisters, Veronica Webb, Arthur Ashe, Gael Monfils … and the list continues.

I’m going to do some laps in the pool now, then relax and lounge on the deck with my iPod and the Blackroc album.  Did you get your hands on the leak?  I can help you out.  But first …

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