Dramaturgical Note

What does Blackness look like?

For many of us, Blackness is identity. It is a place of comfort, the source of a shared experience that is ancient and meaningful. It is hair, skin, family, tradition, community, love.

But if Blackness is hair, which kinds of hair? Natural hair has long been rejected by popular culture and seen as something to be “fixed” in order to achieve success. In the 1900s, products to straighten hair (alongside skin-lightening products) created by and for Black people were already taking off. The first hair products to ever have been conceptualized by, created by, and consumed by African Americans were hair softeners and hair-straightening combs. Influential moments like the “Black is beautiful” movement in the 60s, as well as figureheads like Angela Davis and Diana Ross placed new emphasis on the natural state of Black hair, championing afros and Black self-love. Publications like the Negro Digest began to encourage a new movement “toward a black aesthetic” as a sign of non-conformance to Eurocentric beauty standards. But even then, natural hair was radical—militant, even. This not only shaped the way Black people saw their hair but also the way white people saw Black hair, as an association between natural textured hair and unruliness was formed.

Today, Black hair continues to be hyper-political. The CROWN Act, which was first introduced in 2019 and has since been accepted by seven states, proposes legislation to prohibit race-based hair discrimination, an indication of the continued political reality of our hair. Black hair is persecuted in the workplace, in the classroom, and at home. In fact, the CROWN Act was rooted in a 2019 study by Dove that found that Black women report being 30 percent more likely to receive formal grooming instruction at their workplace, and 1.5 times more likely to be sent home or know of a Black woman who was sent home from work for her hair. It can be a source of derision from any number of sources—those who choose to chemically straighten their hair are criticized by those who those who are natural; Black men are warned to wear their hair in such a way as to not look like a “thug”; 4C hair textures are discarded as “bad hair,” and treated like a curse passed from parent to child. The 2000s saw a resurgence in the natural hair movement with documentaries like My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage in 2005 and Good Hair in 2009, and the new prevalence of Black-owned hair blogs and products

indicate a lot of progress on tearing apart these conceptions. A 2019 Mintel business report found that the Black hair care industry, previously ruled by the sale of relaxers and perms, had made a distinct shift away from chemical stylers and toward more natural products. However, try as we might to celebrate it, many of us still see it as something to tame.

If Blackness is skin, what kind of skin? Colorism reaches back into American history, back to brown paper bag tests and Blue Vein societies, to “house Negroes” and mulattos. The obsession with the “degree to which one was Black” was everywhere, with terms like “quadroon” and “octoroon” perpetuated to denote how much “Black blood” one had in them. For a long time, light-skinned Black people were encouraged to attempt to pass as white, or at least to separate themselves from their Black ancestry in hopes to live a marginally better life. James Weldon Johnson, leader of the NAACP in the early 1900s and author of the lyrics to Lift Every Voice and Sing, authored a fictional story in 1912—based on stories he had gathered throughout his life—called The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man about a man who becomes determined to pass as white after witnessing a lynching. At the end of the book, the “ex-colored man” reflects that he has “sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage,” reflecting the feeling of many that they had to choose either their Blackness or their success. Imitation of Life, released in 1959, drew from a similar dynamic by portraying a white-passing girl who, after being treated awfully upon discovery of being Black, rejects her darker-skinned mother and runs away to live her life passing as white. The movie was preserved in the National Film Registry in 2015 for its cultural, historical, and aesthetical significance.

Today, colorism lives in our families, breeds in our children—researching for this play, I read accounts of little kindergarteners who, when asked to choose the crayon that matches their skin tone to draw a self-portrait, always, always chose crayons that were a shade lighter. About girls who had been told they were “pretty for a darkskinned girl,” about men who were reduced to fetishes by their nonBlack partners. A 2014 study using data from the National Survey of American Life found that dark skin is significantly correlated with Black Americans’ outcomes in educational attainment, household income, and status within their occupation. Light-skinned women are fetishized, branded as exotic, and expected to take it as

a compliment. Sometimes, they are excluded from Blackness altogether. Black skin is commodified: whipped up into chocolate and mocha and honey and coffee. It is also disrespected: compared to dirt, to feces, to charcoal. Lyrics like “And groups of pretty — with them light skin complexion” and “I tell a dark skin chick I’m allergic to chocolate” from dark-skinned artists like Fabolous and Lil’ Wayne—and the primarily light-skinned women featured in their music videos— only contribute to the culture of portraying dark skin as unattractive. Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects in his 2011 article “Dark Girls” about a moment as a child when he told his mother that he “liked light-skin girls.” After being lectured thoroughly, Coates—who is, in fact, darker than his mother—remembers asking himself: “Why do I think that anyway?” The choice to see Black skin as beautiful is, for many of us, a difficult and transformative act.

If Blackness is love, what kind of love? Black love stories have been told, retold, picked apart, and analyzed for decades. From movie classics like Love Jones in 1997, Love and Basketball in 2000, and The Photograph twenty years later, many strides have been made in popularizing Black love stories. However, these are stories that tend to be rife with pain, abuse, and loss of self, particularly for Black women. Black love rarely gets to just be about love. Cultural phenomena like Martin and The Cosby Show modelled a kind of carefree Black love, but for every Mr. and Mrs. Huxtable, there was also an Effie White of Dreamgirls or Celie of The Color Purple. In the space of the theater, productions like for colored girls who have considered suicide and Porgy and Bess shocked audiences by displaying the joys and pains of Black love and femininity. Still, these stories are unique and often are not pushed into the mainstream.

When we do get Black love stories, they often do not look like us. Recent film adaptations like The Sun is Also a Star have been criticized for casting light-skinned women in roles written for darkskinned women—Zoe Saldana, too, came under fire almost a decade ago for her casting in a Nina Simone biopic and the facial prosthetics and nappy wig that were used to help her emulate the iconic—and dark-skinned—singer. Queer black love continues to be virtually invisible in theaters and the mainstream, with Moonlight making history four years ago for being the first all-Black and LGBTQ*-related film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Black love on the screen and the stage often does not reflect what our stories really look like.

Especially from the perspective of the college and online dating scene, romance does not just carry with it the threat of heartbreak but also of invalidation, of rejection based on superficiality, and insecurity in your skin and your worthiness of love. A 2009 survey of dating at predominantly white colleges found that heterosexual Black women tended to experience more stress due to the limited dating pool—the white men were reluctant to date them, and Black and other POC men were in short supply. Another 2009 study supported by The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that among students at majority-white high schools, Black girls were least likely to be romantically involved. In 2014, OkCupid released data that showed that Black women were at the bottom of the list when users rated attraction. At PWIs, dating as a Black woman can come with feelings that we are not the standard but a deviation—an experience, to be recalled fondly in a decade, not to be taken seriously as a potential life partner.

The stories of strife are worth telling, but I also hoped with this play to highlight Black love that is healthy, that is innocent, that is kind. Black love is more than the harmful systems that plague it. It is also the care of a mother to her child, or a friend to their friend, or a person to their partner. Black love is self-love, too. I hoped to show that love is as much a rescuing force as it is a harmful one.

What is Blackness? I do not have an answer. If you are Black, I hope you feel that you belong to it. I hope you never doubt that your experiences are a part of the museum.

What is essential?

Black Anthology’s mission is to explore and celebrate the lived experience and artistry of Black people. All of our pieces of Blackness— the weird ones, the non-stereotypical ones, the flawed ones, and especially the permanent ones—have a place on the stage. This play is the product of a pandemic, but it is not a pandemic play. It is a celebration of family, love, and identity, and what it means to lose them.

Jamila Dawkins, Playwright

Black Anthology 2021