Salon.com > Erin Aubry Kaplan

“Precious” in the age of Obama

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:10:00 +0000

As a black woman, I had one overwhelming reaction to the trailer for "Precious": horror. Watching the unflattering images pile up in the space of a minute -- hugely overweight teen, crazy welfare mother, illegitimate babies, an especially bleak-looking Harlem -- my political alarms went crazy. I glanced uneasily around the almost exclusively white West L.A. theater and thought: Boy, they've done it this time. Noble "Precious" looked to be one more brick in the wall for black folks, something that would bury ever deeper a more nuanced reality that never makes it to the big screen.

And I was right about one thing: They have done it this time. But not at all in the way I imagined. Far from being some exploitative spectacle for whites, the hard-hitting tale of "Precious" is a film for blacks and a challenge to drop our own emotional armor and embrace a real-life story we have been minimizing for a long time -- that of a big, black, sullen-faced, illiterate girl who lives in the depths of the ghetto and in all likelihood will stay there. She is the bogeywoman not just of white society but of black society, too, especially for a middle class that's been trying for years to rescue its "negative" racial image from the likes of Precious. But while we in the real world preach community ad nauseam, it's girls -- and boys -- like her who remain at the bottom of the well. In making the bottom dweller eminently human, the movie forces blacks to assess their own humanity. And I found myself squirming in the seat more than once.

Tyra Banks takes it all off

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:09:00 +0000

Thanks mostly to the intense physical scrutiny of Michelle Obama, black hair is now a subject suitable for public consumption. Well, almost. For the last year, big media's been creeping rather awkwardly up to that point and now seems ready to take words like "pressed" and "processed" out of the black particular and move them into a more permanently accessible cultural space; both Time and the New York Times Sunday Styles section recently ran sober pieces on the social history and multiple meanings of black hairstyles. Meanwhile, black people have been almost forced into a new mode of self-reflection about workaday rituals they assumed were of interest to no one but themselves. (See Chris Rock's upcoming "Good Hair," an unironically titled documentary that profiles the lucrative but little-observed industry that black hair care has been for well over a hundred years.)

The Michelle Obama hair challenge

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:33:00 +0000

Are we moving toward a "black hair" moment?

It might sound like one of those media-created, racially overwrought questions meant to boost ratings and Internet chatter. But with Obama in the White House and a black family center stage -- not to mention a first lady whose appearance and fashion choices are already being endlessly dissected -- the question suddenly becomes almost reasonable.

Consider: Michelle's hairdresser, Johnny Wright, just signed a development deal for his own beauty reality show. Chris Rock recently went to Sundance to screen his documentary "A Good Hair Day," a look at the enormous but mostly unexamined industry and culture of black hair care. "[Black women's] hair costs more than anything they wear," Rock recently said in a Salon interview. "It's like the No. 2, 3 expense of their whole life." Meanwhile, in a recent discussion on MSNBC, black Princeton prof Melissa Harris-Lacewell agreed with Rachel Maddow that an Obama administration meant white people would be more emboldened to ask black people about previously taboo issues, like how they do their hair (Harris-Lacewell admitted she wasn't looking forward to that). The interest is encouraging to a point. And like all white scrutiny of any aspect of black life, it also feels like voyeurism, to a point. The gray area is just one of many reminders that bridging the racial divide, like black hair itself, is going to be complicated.

First lady got back

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:45:00 +0000

Free at last. I never thought that I -- a black girl who came of age in the utterly anticlimactic aftermath of the civil rights movement -- would say the phrase with any real sincerity in my lifetime. But ever since Nov. 4, I've been shouting it from every rooftop. I'm not excited for the most obvious reason. Yes, Obama's win was an extraordinary breakthrough and a huge relief, but I don't subscribe to the notion that his capturing the White House represents the end of American racial history. Far from it. There is a certain freedom in the moment -- as in, we are all now free from wondering when or if we'll ever get a black president. Congratulations to all of us for being around to settle the question.

But what really thrills me, what really feels liberating in a very personal way, is the official new prominence of Michelle Obama. Barack's better half not only has stature but is statuesque. She has coruscating intelligence, beauty, style and -- drumroll, please -- a butt. (Yes, you read that right: I'm going to talk about the first lady's butt.)

Who’s afraid of Michelle Obama?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:48:00 +0000

As Barack Obama moved through the maelstrom of the primary season, I held my breath, along with much of black America. My fear increased in proportion to my exhilaration, at times outpacing it. What would a country that had criminalized blackness for 350 years do when it woke up and realized it was seriously supporting a black man for president? I tracked the bad signs big and small, from the Jeremiah Wright crisis to reports that Obama's young campaign workers were getting shellshocked by racism in Pennsylvania. I kept my eye on the ball with an obsession fueled by a half-sensible, half-quixotic belief that if I and other concerned citizens were vigilant, we could identify any racial slime at its source and contain it before it spread into a national, nonsensical conversation. The goal was not to keep Obama in a bubble, or even to get everybody in his camp -- this is a presidential election, after all -- just to allow a historic campaign to go forward as unimpeded as possible by scurrilous attacks rooted in his color.

After Jena

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Last week, my brother Ahromuz went to Jena, La., and came back a changed man. He took a bus that left Los Angeles and didn't stop until it had reached the tiny Louisiana backwoods town. The march and rally in Jena last Thursday were the culmination of a year of protests over the felony charges against six black Jena teenagers who had allegedly beat a white student at a high school beset with racial tension. One of the many things Ahromuz found unexpectedly transforming was the presence of so many very different black people -- doctors, lawyers, rappers, black nationalist types -- who had gathered from many points around the country for a single purpose. "It was understood that we were all there for the same reason," he said. "Jena -- it was all that people talked about. There was no disagreement. It was incredible."

Black like me — but not too black

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 00:00:00 +0000

When I was about 10, my older brother sometimes called me "Pug." I didn't like it, but it never really galled me the way my brother hoped it would, because as insults went, "pug" was pretty tame. This was the '70s, when the black-is-beautiful movement was in full swing and my light complexion and fine hair -- which could never muster enough kink to be whipped into the requisite Afro -- made me worry that I wasn't black enough; my broad nose actually helped counter that worry and kept me in vogue. Of course, this new affirmation didn't mean that a certain ancient self-hatred had disappeared entirely, but black people at least seemed to have evolved past the musty obsession with chiseled noses as the chief standard bearers of beauty -- something I grew up associating with all those tragic-mulatto potboiler novels from the late 19th century in which the secretly black heroine's aquiline nose was like a talisman that always protected her from harm and preceded her in good fortune.

The color of love

Wed, 14 Feb 2001 20:12:00 +0000

Two years ago, if anyone had asked, I would have said that I would probably never marry. I had nothing against the institution, but by my middle 30s I had come to believe that the marriage I'd always imagined might never happen. I didn't find this tragic; I found it liberating. Not getting married meant absolution from a number of entanglements I could do without -- a deadwood relationship, compromised living space, the halfhearted internal debate about whether to have babies. While I embraced the idea of marriage, I embraced solitude in equal measure. I found a certain elation in the prospect of a future in which I could allow my emotions and shoe-buying impulses to run free. At age 37, my desire for freedom seemed to have neatly trumped my yearning for anything, or anyone, else. And that was fine with me.

In this rare state of contentment, I met Alan Kaplan, who was 43 and in a state of extreme discontent. We met at his house on a Sunday afternoon, though he didn't want to meet me at all, let alone on a weekend. He was a white public high school teacher who had become the epicenter of a racially charged controversy at his campus. Because I am a journalist with a particular interest in matters of racial justice, I had been enlisted by an irate group of black parents at the school, and subsequently by my paper, to do a story about it.

Post-traumatic slavery syndrome

Tue, 24 Oct 2000 17:21:00 +0000

The new millennium may still be on the horizon, but at least one truism can already be ascribed to our new New Age: It's a damned confusing time to be black. Ask anybody -- a single mom who is both vilified for her poverty and valorized for her strength, an invisible and uneasy member of the middle class (me), the increasingly hapless Puff Daddy, with his big diamonds and even bigger scowls, the enormously successful but racially repressed Tiger Woods.

Never before in history have blacks loomed so large in the public imagination and popular culture yet been granted so little space as real people. And, by no accident, never before have they experienced higher rates of depression, homicide and suicide: Black youth in particular have watched their suicide rates explode at millennium's close, increasing 114 percent in the past 20 years.

What gives? More to the point, why isn't anybody asking what gives? If we are truly the nurturing, pro-young-people nation we claim to be, why aren't our political leaders sitting up nights wondering why black men between the ages of 20 and 24 are now killing themselves at 10 times the rate of their female counterparts?