Response #2 -- by Wanda Carr

When I was a little girl, it did not seem as though I was very old before I realized that girls and boys were expected to play with different toys, act a certain way, and dress appropriately for members of their gender. Because I was always somewhat of a tomboy, I found the scolding that I received from my kindergarten teacher for wanting to play with the building blocks and Legos a bit harsh. But, playing with the dolls, dishes, and kitchen center were really quite boring to me, and I protested against not being able to design my block creations to match those found in the pictures and diagrams inside the Lego box by hiding the Legos in the kitchen center’s refrigerator and building with them during recess rather than playing house with the rest of the girls.
When I reached first grade, my passion for building continued. For Christmas, my only request from Santa was for my very own box of Legos. It seems that my parents shared in Mrs. Nelson’s and Mrs. Haupt’s desire to keep me away from building blocks and rector sets because I did not receive Legos for that Christmas nor any other Christmas for that matter. Instead, I got a Barbie, several Barbie outfits, and various items with which I was told I could now accessorize. Angry at Santa’s cruel attempt at providing me with gender-appropriate toys rather than the ones I really wanted, I threw the doll and the clothes in an old shoebox and only played with her when my parents made me.
I was reminded of these incidents in reading both selections for this week. In “Black Skin, White Masks,” Frantz Fanon eludes to the notion that is language, which innately keeps blacks in their appropriate place in a society where an aggressor nation has colonized the uncivilized inhabitants of a backward nation in an attempt to christianize them. In the name of making the natives better, the colonizers have actually created a type of pigeon tongue designed to show the inferiority of the natives in the colony. Though the elite society acts pretentiously to civilize the group, their attempts to mold them into a dialectal tone of grammatical innuendos is really a grotesque means of portraying the image, which the aggressors feel the downtrodden should possess. They are shocked when for some reason, the words that come tumbling from the native’s tongue are really quite good English/French. Consequently, they accuse these blacks of trying to speak as though they are white, desperately seeking for a means to put them back in their place.
Fanon also denotes the improper emphasis, which has been placed on the false desire of black men for white women—an issue that even in our own country has been the abominable justification for many lynchings. He goes on to show that in all actualities, it seems justly appropriate for white men to desire black women—using them for a while, but never intending to marry them or make things right. The juxtaposition of reality and notion clearly show the horror of the oxymoron. Yet, in his opinion, women of color seem to thrive on the strange notion that even though they are aware of being used by members of the fairer skinned cult, the prestige of having whiter offspring makes the plight of the defamation sickly worth it.
On a lighter note, Gerald Early in “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant” blames the need for black women, his daughters included, to be more like white women because they have seen that sort of women win the Miss America Pageants time and again. He tries to act as though the whole thing is a joke, but in reality, he knows that even though his wife has insisted on getting her daughters black Barbies to play with and celebrating their cultural heritage, his girls have been subjected to the cultural views from American society at large that white is in.
Both authors are trying to show that despite attempts to prevent stereotypical notions about the role of gender and race, the larger society dictates the standards by which all of its members should play at acting their parts. There really isn’t anything wrong with girls playing with building blocks instead of Barbies, but those who attempt to step out of the appropriately dictated boundaries are destined to be the objects of much ridicule and scorn.