Blog Post #4 "Color Complex"

With a term like "the color complex" I'm thinking of the effect of colorism on communities of black people--an effect of white supremacy that still lingers to this day. 

In the works for this class, I personally didn't see any colorism casting within the communities of the poets we read, but instead there was a shift between the cultural notions of lightness as constituting virtue and darkness as representing sin. I was interested in seeing if there were any poets this week that subverted this harmful and hegemonic binary of dark=bad and light=good.

In looking at Terrance Hayes' "Some Luminous Distress (for Betty Shabazz)"  (91) I did notice a shift from the typical colorist binary as reinforced by white supremacy. The American space, "palatial and white with stars" cannot "save" the speaker--this brings up the stars on the American flag and also the convoluted and elevated notions of self that many white people hold. There is a moment where the speaker reinforces this departure, where she equates brightness/light with burning, a burning that will not save her--"Three blocks from here: / The flame, and somewhere else, the white-- // palmed child who set it".  The fact that the title relates brightness with distress is pretty telling. 

Major Jackson makes a similar move in "Rose Colored City" (98-99), though this time the speaker directly deals with light-skinned neo-Nazis. When called out by the speaker with his "dark / smile," they "stomp Nazi-like, / cursing, Aryan heads bald / as trophies in gold // streetlight," here color is both a signification of white supremacy and also signifies the value of the speaker standing up to these people. The ending of this poem shows a direct splitting of community, where the effects of neo-Nazism split the community apart, and send all "back / to our segregated lives".

The most explicit subversion is in Kelly Norman Ellis's "Superhero," where Sapphire, the speaker, is able to reclaim a darkness that has been historically oppressed and made to seem less than. She states that she arrives, "not a white girl in tights but / the real one-breasted amazon / riding a black unicorn" (64). This subversion is important in order for her to become a protector and to have access to self-worth and power.