20/20 Gimme a Break!
LL
As we all know, the tragic mulatto stereotype is a widespread and widely held belief in popular American culture. In media outlets for decades, it has come to the point of reaching a certain cultural norm.
This past Friday, 20/20 had a small piece on a mother-daughter relationship called “Conflicted Over Color.” In it, the daughter has light skin and doesn’t feel accepted “by either side.” The mother is a darker skinned black woman who tries with the information she has, to comfort her daughter (”My mom would tell me that those kids were jealous and that i’ve got the best of both worlds”). Many of the points seem straight out of Imitation of Life (e.g., issues with mom picking up the daughter at school, feelings of resentment, depression, anger, etc).
[Note from CVK: Hehe… sorry folks, I couldn’t resist illustrating this post with a still from Imitation of Life. Yup, that’s Sarah Jane reduced to singing half-naked in a seedy nightclub. One of the archetypical moments that EVERY tragic mulatto story must include.]
The piece then takes a sharp turn when it goes to get color-commentary from a biracial woman who wrote some book on raising mixed children and she provided some quotes to the effect of “of course, there are going to be some issues of resentment, depression.” And of course, to keep this issue of mixed race nauseatingly over-simplistic, they only went to one source and didn’t talk to MAVIN about their resource book, Maria P.P. Root about her books, or New Demographic about their different programs.
Then the piece takes a final cut and picks up where Imitation of Life left off. The mother is still alive (unlike the movie), but the daughter who is said to have “found my identity,” feels extremely bad about how she treated her mom and now thinks of her life as finding ways to “make it up to her.”
To me, what I found issue with was just how this was being presented by 20/20. One of the opening lines from the reporter is “Where does she fit in? Does she even fit in anywhere?”
Secondly, they make this thing an entirely skin color based topic. Granted the one-drop rule is an important issue but they never name-check it or talk about anything else. There don’t get into anything beyond [my paraphrasing here] “I feel like an alien” and then “I’m OK with myself. I’m a writer on Scrubs and I’m getting married to a black guy so chew on that.”
This portrayal and representation isn’t anything new in the media so it’s no surprise to still see it being show in this light. But what I think is important to question is that Imitation of Life is a story of fiction. This woman’s story is her real life. How do we negotiate the issues we find with this representation with the stereotypes that people have whether it be through narrative or memoir? If 20/20 had framed this a little differently and been a little more sensitive about it and done more research, would the lone portrayal of the biracial woman still be a problem, if it’s just her life and her experience and her story? If you ask me, I think it is irresponsible at best to over-simplistically just use this as your lone “race” example on a 2-hour long special. Sure this is her true story and sure she has a right to be honest with how she felt, but you can’t show this without a diversity of images. I mean, seriously. The message here from this woman and 20/20 is “you’ll have a tragic childhood and you probably wont be OK with anything until you become an adult. Just deal with it. And buy my book when it comes out on Amazon, it’s called ‘Mixed: My life in black and white’” I think that’s a load of grade 4A crap. Gimme a Break!!!
RL_Model wrote:
Nauseating is right. They still want to fetishize biracial women, but do it in a PC light. The alienation-acceptance-guilt model makes for better TV than having emotionally stable biracial people discuss their experiences being raised in loving homes (I guess that’s why I didn’t get a call).
While I did not view the program, I also think, that the commentary implies that social imperatives will dictate that a biracial child will resent the minority parent and that finding one’s identity means embracing a minority identity, which is totally false. Having a “tragic childhood” has nothing to do with one’s background and everything to do with how a person is raised.
Posted 30 Jan 2006 at 11:46 am ¶
ISD2 wrote:
This story was way oversimplified and sensational - ick! The lead-in itself was awful: “Imagine your mother…has a skin color so strikingly different that people often stare.” Really, ABC, it’s not as uncommon or as tragic as you make it sound! :P The piece only reinforced the idea that mixed people are identity-challenged, confused victims.
Posted 31 Jan 2006 at 1:11 am ¶
jarvisr wrote:
thats why mixed people should make there own media/tv channel.
Posted 31 Jan 2006 at 7:43 pm ¶
RL_Model wrote:
“thats why mixed people should make there own media/tv channel.”
Yes, but that doesn’t address the problem of how biracial people are depicted in the mainstream media.
Posted 01 Feb 2006 at 7:26 pm ¶
ciri wrote:
I am a very pale white guy happily married to a light brown mixed girl. We have two daughters. The first is light brown, like my wife. The second is almose as pale as me. I have never got any comments on how migh older daughter was “so much darker” than me, but my wife has gotten comments, even from my family, to the effect “its weird how light she looks next to you.” Annoying, yes, tragic, no. If it happens when my daughters get older, they will get an explanation based in genetics…
Posted 03 Feb 2006 at 5:32 pm ¶
Anonymous wrote:
Ciri: Exactly - so many people think that with siblings, if one is lighter or darker, then one must be more “X” or “Y” than the other.
>If it happens when my daughters get older, they will get an explanation based in genetics…
When that time comes, google “human skin color genetics” or some such and you should get a heterogenous cross including the 6 allelles that are responsible (all together) with skin tone.
I’ve also seen a color wheel (but couldn’t find it online) that shows the spectrum of human skin tone that could also be used as a visual.
Posted 04 Feb 2006 at 1:11 am ¶
Lyonside wrote:
Crap… w/ all the anon’s running around, I gotta clarify - that last Anonymous was me.
Posted 04 Feb 2006 at 7:03 pm ¶
A.D. Powell wrote:
The television networks try to promote the “one drop” myth of “black blood” in the name of fighting “racism.” If they were openly racist, people would be less confused. They never point out evidence against the “one drop” myth such as the black ancestry in Hispanics and Arab-Americans (people who almost never identify as “black”) and the fact that blacks as a group believe in it more than whites.
The poor woman in this story is being fed the lie that she has to identify with blacks and marry a black or she doesn’t “love” her mother (The “Imitation of Life” nonsense). No parent has a right to demand that her child sacrifice herself like that.
Posted 20 Feb 2006 at 12:24 am ¶
Frankie wrote:
I haven’t seen this 20/20 program, but I am sure that this crap is something they’d totally pull. Take ONE mulatto woman’s tale and make it seem like every mixed kid is suffering through the same thing. God. I’m mulatto and just the THOUGHT of resenting my own mother for being much darker and “blacker” than me is so OUTRAGEOUS. Race was never an issue in my family– not to say that I’m colorblind. I find that colorblindess is just another form of liberal multiculturalism. Saying “yes, we are all different and that is what makes us special” doesn’t fight racism. Being critical and trying to understand WHY we are all different and why some people are treated a certain way is a more constructive method to combat racism.
Anyway, I presume this woman’s parents are both American. If she’s confused because of her situation, it’s probably a good thing her mother isn’t from the Caribbean and speaks a language other than English. I don’t think she would have made it in my biracial/bilingual family. Oddly enough it was mostly the black students in school that gave me a harder time than the white students. The white students often thought I was Latina/Hispanic and then I get exotified by them… Like I’m some specimen or an oddity. “Oh you’re black???” they’d ask. “How can you be black when you look Puerto Rican?” I’m tired of dealing with those questions.
Oh, and when people found out that Terrance Howard from the movie “Crash” was 1/2 white, they flocked to me (the resident Mulatto Kid for some people) and asked how it was possible he could be 1/2 white when he is so dark. “Uh… how is it possible that your daughter has blonde hair when both the parents have brown hair?” I’d reply. “Oh, right…. genetics.” Duh.
Posted 16 Apr 2006 at 6:29 pm ¶
Laura Robles wrote:
You know I am at a passe, I have two daughters who live in Colorado who are have of me a Mexican-American and half of their father African-American. We were married for 10 hears and he cheated on me with a white woman, whom he impregnated 2 weeks before me. We tried to work it out but he continued to sleep with white woman, married, single, seperated you name it, I finally left him and moved back to Colorado, where my children were 4 and 8 years old. I lived in Colorado all my life with the exception of the time I was gone to the military, the black girls shuned my daughters, the mexican girls shuned my daughters, and yet my ex tried to get my children to like his white women. Where does this leave my childlren, a highschool drop out who was given an ultimatum to be something and someone, graduated from college and is still continuing, a younger daughter who is on the deans list both in high school and college simultaneously, but they feel they have no identity because of their father, who doesn’t know if he is black or white, or if he is a man or a father to someones white bastard, so how are my daughters suppose to feel? Does he call the at Thanksgiving, Christmas or their birthdays, does he send them gifts, no his analogy is ” I have a life” sorry your mother doesn’t. I have responsibilties, I have bills to pay, but my children seen he has Rolex watches, he drives a brand new car he owns a home, and here is their mother, went back to college to earn her degree, but still only gets by, what is the picture my chlidren see????
Posted 25 Jul 2006 at 3:39 am ¶