Ruby nodded and put the book inside her purse. “That’s nice of you, Barack. I’m sure he will.” Then, abruptly, she
stood up and straightened her skirt. “Well, I better get going,” she said, and hurried out the door.
For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s eyes. I had handled the moment badly, I told myself,
made her feel ashamed for a small vanity in a life that could afford few vanities. I realized that a part of me expected
her and the other leaders to possess some sort of immunity from the onslaught of images that feed every American’s
insecurities-the slender models in the fashion magazines, the square-jawed men in fast cars-images to which I myself
was vulnerable and from which I had sought protection. When I mentioned the incident to a black woman friend of
mine, she stated the issue more bluntly.
“What are you surprised about?” my friend said impatiently. “That black people still hate themselves?”
No, I told her, it wasn’t exactly surprise that I was feeling. Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in
Life magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community-good hair, bad
hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back. In college, the politics of black fashion,
and the questions of self-esteem that fashion signified, had been a frequent, if delicate, topic of conversation for black
students, especially among the women, who would smile bitterly at the sight of the militant brother who always seemed
to be dating light-skinned girls-and tongue-lash any black man who was foolish enough to make a remark about black
women’s hairstyles.
Mostly I had kept quiet when these subjects were broached, privately measuring my own degree of infection. But I
noticed that such conversations rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites. Later, I would realize
that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too
scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to
whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first
place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred-for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look
at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.
It was in observing that division, I think, between what we talked about privately and what we addressed publicly, that
I’d learned not to put too much stock in those who trumpeted black self-esteem as a cure for all our ills, whether
substance abuse or teen pregnancy or black-on-black crime. By the time I reached Chicago, the phrase self-esteem
seemed to be on everyone’s lips: activists, talk show hosts, educators, and sociologists. It was a handy catchall to
describe our hurt, a sanitized way of talking about the things we’d been keeping to ourselves. But whenever I tried to
pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might
feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself
because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved
as a child-only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into
her veins...and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the
fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless
universe?
Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about
self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning
barré
(Barré)
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