For my last intervention, I chose to expand on my previous
interventions by using my previous projects as outlets to add onto my last one.
While coming up with ideas, I contemplated what it is that I wanted to focus on
so I could shed light onto my topic, raise awareness and for people to be able
to engage and participate. For my final intervention I decided to use a black
canvas portraying the oppression that darker skin folks face and put-up sticky
notes of how people felt about colorism. I also wanted to create a montage of different
people’s opinions on colorism, their experiences, activists who have raised awareness
on the topic.
Throughout
all my interventions, I have done plenty of research regarding colorism. Colorism
is a topic that is not talked about enough, people know that it exists yet disregard
it, unwilling to confront the harsh truth. I chose colorism because like all
the other important isms, colorism is the least of people’s concern, except for
those it affects and the ones who must live through it daily. I have not experienced
colorism but knowing that it exists and am able to use the resources already
available to me to create some sort of impact was motivation enough. While doing these projects, I have gained a
lot of knowledge that I otherwise wouldn’t.
A lot of people have yet to widely acknowledge colorism’s
existence whether it’s because they may not know about it or refuse to admit
that it exists. Colorism is the social marginalization and systemic oppression of
people with darker skin tone and the privile1ging of people with lighter skin
tone. Where racism discriminates against people based on their racial identity,
colorism discriminates based on the shade or tone of a person’s complexion. People
of different races can have the same skin tone, and people of the same race can
have different skin tones.
That means that this kind of bias
can happen even among people of the same race or ethnicity. However, colorism
is not self-imposed. It’s informed by centuries of racism and violence that
forced individuals to align themselves with whiteness to survive. Whether consciously or unconsciously, those
with colorist attitudes perceive people with lighter skin tones as more
educated, attractive, prestigious, and capable than those with darker skin tones.
“But art is also used to challenge authority and privilege,
often precisely by challenging how those in power see the world.”
“Our sense of possibility is limited by what we can imagine,
and our imaginations are bound by the culture within which we can imagine.”
“We can also create actions that propose radically new ways
of making sense of reality. Instead of revealing the world at is, we here demonstrate
the world as it should be, prefiguring the reality we desire.”
While making
this intervention, I did some research and discovered a couple of activists
women who spoke about/against the issue. One of the activists was Alice walker,
she’s known for being the first person to use the term “colorism.” In an essay from
her 1983 book, in search of our mothers’ gardens, walker defines colorism as “prejudicial
or preferential treatment of same race people based solely on their color.” I found
about Nina Simone through a film that was made about her life and found out that
she was an American classical singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights
activist.
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