The History of Otherness

As I was sitting here trying to decide what to blog about, a show came on TV called “Who Do You Think You Are?” This show, produced by Lisa Kudrow, traces the lineage of an individual and tries to uncover the history of their family. This particular episode follows a NFL player, Emmitt Smith, who wants to learn of his heritage and his family back into Africa. His research begins by looking through a book of “colored” marriage licenses from 1854. That the marriage licenses were divided by skin color shocked him and he said, “I’ve never had to drink from a ‘colored’ water fountain, but I really felt the power of segregation in that moment”.

Today, we have adopted political corectness to the point that it is only acceptable to speak well of another race. That person could be the most annoying, self-centered, selfish, rude, incapable person in the world, and by the law of political correctness, you must ignore their personality and admire their ‘struggle’. Is that not racism as well? Sturken and Cartwright address this feeling of segregation and acknowledgement of difference because of skin color, proposing, “binary oppositions designate the first category as unmarked and the second as marked, or other". I thought it was interesting he did not feel the power of his “otherness” so strongly until he traced his blood into the time of slavery, when slaves were treated “worse than animals” and the colored man was delineated into the realm of a separate species because of his color. I blame this on the law of PC we hold today. It’s not that we’ve become colorblind, it’s that we’ve become increasingly concerned with appearing to be.  

DNA testing determined he is 81% African, something he is very proud and relieved of. This struck me positively in juxtaposition to the Fanon “Fact of Blackness” reading which makes it seem as though being black is something to be humiliated of. It does not undermine or the fact that, yes, black skin is distinctly the “other” compared to white American “norms” and that the feeling of “otherness” persists. What it does is suggest a sense of shame does not necessarily accompany this “otherness”.