JIGGA-BOO VS WANNA BE

I hadn't seen the movie in such a long time. As a child, this movie was just entertaining, but now watching it at an older age, I see a lot more meaning in the movie. The biggest part of the movie that stood out to me was color. This theme was focused throughout the entire movie. It showed blacks literally name calling because of color. This movie felt over exaggerated. I didn't want to believe that color was such a big deal to people. However, this made me reflect on blacks in this time period and whether or not they truly treated each other based on color. Overall the movie brought in several themes, but this was the most prevalent one to me.

Color in this movie was focused on in many different views. You had light-skin vs dark-skin sororities. There were dark-skin deans with high-yella wives. The hair styles were different based on color. This movie was literally divided amongst color in a way I had never seen before. To see color separate blacks so dramatically was shocking. They acted as if they were completely different races. While there were mainly all lights and darks in the different groups, at some points you would see the opposite color in the opposite group. This was not a surprise, but definitely something to mention. They didn’t only classify by skin color, but by hair type as well. This was very similar to the notions in the book Negro Land.

Another pretty distinct thing was that the light skins wore contacts, this was very interesting to me because I, being light skin, have never been extremely interested in wearing contacts, let alone blue of all colors. However when my boy cousin who is spitting image of me, including color, started to attend a white, private school in our hometown, all of a sudden he started to wear blue contacts. I thought this was crazy, but in the new environment he was in, this was acceptable for a blacks to do. Black people have a long history of changing themselves to fit in, both lights and darks, but in this movie it was mainly the lights who were doing the physical altering. One other thing I wondered was whether or not some darks were trying to be “Blacker”? Were they making their hair more nappy to fit better into the darker category? While I didn’t notice this in the movie, it makes me want to watch it again to see if attention is drawn to this. The one thing that was pointed out was the pro-black character dating one of the darkest sisters on campus to further is pro-black agenda.

I am pretty sure this emphasis on color was purposely done in the movie. For what purpose I am unsure, however it definitely made me stop and focus on the ridiculous, baseless, division amongst the race. Because of this movie I have decided to center the rest of my blogs for this week around color in the black community, enjoy.

#Neyci