Race, Color, and Class in the Black Community.
In black America today, there exists a variety of attitudes about one's race. These attitudes include superficial values about color hues and social status. In "Shades of Black" by Mary Mebane and "How It Feels To Be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston, the authors describe factors that influence attitudes about race, color, and class. Acceptance of white beauty standards, upbringing, and the media are factors that influence those attitudes in the black community. Often the factors also disrupt the unity within the black community.
Since slavery, the black community has been forced to accept being white as beautiful. A person has to have long blond hair and blue eyes to be beautiful. The closest thing to that in the black community is to have long hair and light skin. To some black people, this makes a person acceptable to society. However, many black youth still suffer from slights within their own race about how light or dark they may be, how much money their parents make, and being black in general. Some of the upper class, lighter skinned black youths belittle their peers with a lower class status or darker complexion. According to Mebane's essay, having extremely dark skin was seen as a heavy burden to bear. At her school there were people that received mistreatment because of their equally dark skin. Those people saw themselves as victims because they did not have light skin and long hair. Because of the acceptance of white beauty standards, the people in Mebane's town were self conscious of themselves and felt that only certain black people could be successful. The unity in Mebane's community was disrupted because of the beliefs held by those people in the town.
Attitudes about race, color and class in the black community are also influenced by the way blacks raised their children. Some black youths are raised to think that having light skin is one of the best things in the world.
