Anti Racist Appropriation

DEADLINE Monday, May 2. Minimum 1000 words.

One very important point of Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer essay on white esthetic describes the virtual monopoly exerted by white folks on the means of production and consumption of art in American history in an effort to ensure and perpetuate their often subtle racial domination. This subtlety of racial domination is further evidence by what Sander Gilman and Evelyn Nakano Glenn identified as symbolic violence or instances of internalize racism. Most often symbolic violence manifests itself as a cultural appropriation in the form of racist appropriation or anti-racist appropriation. This essay focus on showcasing an example of anti-racist appropriation in which the Duke, Ellington
Questioning the individual consciousness and motives is a distraction which prevents us from seizing these forces behind the yearning for whiteness and the magnitude of the problem. Skin lightening (Evelyn Nakano Glenn) several examples on how minorities from Africa, Asia Europe, to America, from colonization to our modernity have internalized racism (contempory) through the use of skin lightener. Skin bleaching translates the acceptation of the expression of the white beauty as the true beauty, light skin as a symbolic capital. These authors likewise noticed that from as early as 1970, the demand in the cosmetic market for sking lightener has been growing steadily in Japan, Korea and China. Their observation is similar in Mexico, Brazil and Central America. In 1980, in America particularly, white baby boomer became obsessed with skin lightener product in an effort to keep their youthful appearance affected by years of over exposition to the tropical sun. This resurgence of this bleaching ideology is concomitant in society with western capitalism prominence and the major proponents behind it were big multinational pharmaceutical company like L’Oreal, Shiseido or Unilever. These companies fed the preexisting colonialist and racist need for bleaching but further created new needs through their marketing strategies by depicting blackness as abject
Gilman noted the Jewish identity as a social construct in which the Jewish body underwent rejection, alteration in order to assimilate. Gilman pointed that the majority’s culture in the West has represented the Jews body in such an abject way that, internalizing this representation, forced the Jews to physically violate themselves by surgically reducing their nose size and bridge in an atempt to escape their jewishness and becoming aesthetically acceptable. Gilman painted the Jewish body as a social construct that evolves, shaped by others and shaping the Jewish identity. The following quote summarizes the essence of this writing: “Race is a constructed category of social organization as much as it is a reflection of some aspect of biological reality. Racial identity has been a powerful force in shaping how we, at the close of the twentieth century, understand ourselves- often in spite of ourselves.” He went on to show that skin color, facial angle, diseases, nose curvature were different racial aesthetic meters used in the evaluation of a Jewish identity and surgical procedure was a mean of curing the unaesthetical Jewish identity. As opposed to the main story about Jewish identity reconstructed through its rejection, and the alteration of the Jewish body, Gilma5n touched on the concept of transvaluation in