Quirky Black Girls: Huey Newton Complexes

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Huey Newton Complexes

via The Crunk Feminist Collective by moyazb on 8/23/10

Whatever does one mean by the phrase, "Huey Newton Complex(es)"? So glad you asked. A Huey Newton Complex is a rather snarky, yet awesomely witty way of describing a light skinned person crunk about (their) blackness in ways that, perhaps, obscure other realities that may indeed inflect (their) blackness–like gender identification, sexuality, economic class, or skin color. The one drop rule notwithstanding, Huey Newton Complexes goad light skinned Negroes into stringently proving and deploying their blackness just in case one raises an eyebrow around the melanin content of their skin; hence, The Black Panther Party and Shazza Zulu (aka Freddie Brooks' boyfriend), for example. Just in case you haven't perused the colored section of the blogosphere lately, know Huey lives–and not just through a cartoon character: light skinned girls are not having the best week ever. Apparently their blackness is perpetually being questioned, and they're fed up. A few blog entries posted last week by light skinned black women struck us as particularly emblematic of light skinned women being "sick and tired of being sick and tired."

It has always been fun for me to experience the myriad ways disability "whitens" me as I go about life in the mainstream (i.e., white, non-disabled) world. Essentially, the way this works is that the cultural perception that disabled peeps are childlike, always in need of charity and/or help usually overcomes the threat posed by my race. I've always thought of it as a kind of "fuck you — your racism deserves to be subverted by my disability." I've never had the experience where disability whitens me in/before an African-American eye.

I emerged from the whatever it is in Philadelphia — metro? subway? SEPTA? — and pushed past the bus stop. An older African-American woman reached out to me: "You white?" I was so shocked that I stopped and told her how rude that was. In so doing, I was, of course, rude myself. She got irate, because she thought she was giving me a compliment. [breathes.] This pissed me off. So, I stopped to tell her what I thought of that perspective. Bad idea, yes.

And another:

I tried my damndest not to join Alpha Kappa Alpha because of the stigmas attached to it. But, you can't run from who you are. I feel like a neo defending my honor when I say this but I joined because of the women who lifted me up – and they were light and dark complected…and about their business.

For one of our townhall meeting conversations, I helped organize a panel to talk about the role of intra-racial relations and identity. We opened with the notorious "paper bag test." I took it. I failed. And the room was wide-eyed with amazement. Even some of my chapter sorors gasped. I don't know why. I got some melanin. Chuch.

As brown skinned ladies invested in our blackness, we're happy that our lighter sistren are not only identifying as black, but finding blackness in themselves and loving it fiercely. Light skinned black women are saying it loud and proud, "I'm Black damn it!" Still, there's something especially perturbing about the way in which these versions of a commitment to blackness are delineated. In other words, what we've tracked in these posts and other sources is a kind of "Woe is (light skinned) me," rhetoric that implicitly negates the privilege embedded in commencing and participating in such discourse. Such personal narratives, though valuable, seem unwilling to divulge fully the way that being light skinned traditionally works both intra- and interracially.

Being black, or simply being non-white in a world built on white supremacy, is rough. But when we ignore the ways that difference inflects our own relationship to marginal status, we miss nuances that are important in shaping our individual realities. It's a similar rhetorical move we implicitly employ when we use the term "people of color" without acknowledging the realities of involuntary immigration, language, model minority status, alienation from land and traditional practices, ability, sexuality, class, and yes of course, skin color. The vagueness of a term such as "people of color," although ostensibly an effort to semantically unite those who must endure white supremacy in various forms, simultaneously jettisons the inherent differences upon which white supremacy is based, namely racial/ethnic/skin hierarchies, under the guise of "unity." The term "people of color," then, is covertly dishonest, and inevitably forecloses the space wherein we might discuss the hierarchy within the hierarchy. Woe is hypodescent!

To be sure, amplifying the differences in discussions of the ways that folks are oppressed does not play into the master's hands, but rather compels us to be diligent and rigorous in our critique of (intra)racial strata and how they affect our lives. Similarly, light skinned black women discussing their very real experiences of oppression without examining the way that (skin) privilege informs the type of marginal status they endure within and beyond the black community prevents a power analysis that is necessary for liberation. Furthermore, attempting to silence that privilege by not footnoting it at the very least is a rather indirect refusal of the agency one is granted by embodying the fact of light skinned blackness. What further exacerbates this narrative decision is the anger projected upon the dark(er) skinned interlocutors in each of the aforementioned blog posts; the response by the storytellers suggests that questioning a light skinned person's connection (to blackness) is somehow irrational, thereby treating the most blatant aspect of the colorism/interracial narrative–intraracial division predicated on skin tone–as a kind of imagined source of division, to say the least.

In order to further facilitate a nuanced discussion of blackness, namely as it pertains to skin privilege, we've started a light skin privilege list that we invite light skinned sisters to make on their own. We all know that the real number one is admitting you have a problem–or are one. Word to DuBois, O.G. light skinned cat.

Light Skin Privilege Checklist

In most situations where I am with other people of color, white people will try to communicate with me first.
I am more likely to appear in the media, especially if my skin affords me the designation "omniracial." (Hello, Beyonce.)
People will think I am pretty. full stop.
I am more likely to get a promotion than my darker skinned counter parts.
I can write blog pieces about my skin color and not reflect on the privileges that are associated with it. (Wallace Thurman notwithstanding, literature, films, blogs are littered with primary and secondary textual analysis of the meanings of light skinnededness.)

… And the list goes on.

We invite all readers of (all shades) color to check out Moya and Lex's effort last year to get skin privilege/POC diversity conversation started at the Love Harder Blog.

*"We" are Moya B. and Summer M.