Dark Skin, Light Skin, Straight Hair, Nappy Hair: Do Black Men Reinforce A Color Caste System For Wo

Viola Davis, last nights Emmy winner for Best Actress In Dramatic Series, gave a historic dramatic speech in which she quoted Harriet Tubman, and thanked the writers and actresses that enabled her to "cross the line" and win an honor formerly accessible only to white women. Previously, when actress Lupita Nyong'o won an Oscar for her role in Twelve Years A Slave, she expressed many of the same sentiments. Is color and hair texture still an issue when it comes to defining womanhood? In chapter four of The Female Solution we discuss the politics behind how women define themselves. It comes down to a battle of genetics. Whose physical traits represent the good people, the smart people, the pretty people? We know of the white doll/ black doll experiment, in which little black girls, when given a choice, selected the white doll as the one that was good, smart, and pretty, and said the black doll was bad, dumb and ugly. How do we talk about that painful reality in African American culture, so we can face and correct the widespread, self-perpetuated color caste system that leaves so many African Americans emotionally scarred?