Paradox

While reading ‘’Straightening Our Hair’’ by bell hooks, I came across a sentence that struck me as vital as the whole essay itself. It was pretty odd, considering that was not the first time I encountered this very fact. In the article, hooks mentioned a black woman who ‘’asserted that her home was a place where blackness was affirmed and celebrated’’. The word ‘’celebrated’’ is what had drawn my attention.
Experience teaches me that black children are encouraged to be proud of being black by their parents, and ‘’Straightening Our Hair’’ bears witness to my assertion. However, I don’t see anything worth ‘’celebrating’’ in being black, just as there is nothing to be ‘’celebrated’’ in being white. Every person, regardless of his or her race, should just accept their skin colour, rather than celebrate it. Therefore, a black person should just accept that, as a matter of fact, he or she is black. Now when I say accept, by no means do I imply that it should be accepted as a necessary, inevitable evil, or any kind of flaw. It is just a matter of facing reality.
Interestingly enough, I believe that no one has ever heard a white person make such a statement: that he is proud of being white. In his essay ‘’Race and the Schooling of Black Americans’’, Claude Steele tried to prove that the reason black students in general score lower on tests had nothing to do with ‘’genetic inferiority’’, but rather with low self-esteem caused by what is known as the ‘’Stereotype Threat’’. The way I see it, celebrating blackness is a way for black people to constantly reassure themselves that they are just as good as, for example, whites. The need for this kind of ‘’celebration’’ rises from the self-esteem issues Steele had written about in his essay. Surprisingly enough, it appears that some black people are having trouble accepting that they are, indeed, just as good a human being as anybody else. Even though they celebrate blackness and claim to be proud of it, it appears they don’t actually believe it. As weird as it may seem, this celebration only further aggravates the situation of our society, instead of taking us one step closer to racial equality.
If the imaginary differences between blacks and whites are ever to be erased and if our society is ever to reach absolute racial equality, the ‘’celebration’’ has to stop.