The Hair issue in America: From an Historical retrospective (Part 2)

The part 1 of the Hair issue in America was about the evolutionary retrospective, this part will go a little back in history to shed the light on the hair texture and skin tone impact on African American  mentality, and how it reflect on their daily behavior and attitude, the post is mostly an accumulation of extracts from PDF texts treating the subject, the title of the paragraphs represent the PDF source of the text. 

At the end a Video that I made years ago, but never published until this post, Part 1 being deleted from YouTube...

All cultures make the distinction between "us" and "other." Persecution of "others" has long been a human behavior pattern. However the unique form of racism seen in the western world developed as part of a struggle between classes (nobles versus serfs; royalty versus commoners; Northern Europeans versus other Europeans; all Europeans versus non-Europeans). In nineteenth century United States, Europeans were seen as superior to Black slaves, and a relation developed that was different from servility. The slaves were converted into a pariah group, outsiders who were banned from society and the major institutions of social structure.

The Relationship of Skin Tone and Hair ~~Stefanie R. Snider

The impact of skin color in the African American community has been heavily documented. Light-skinned persons are viewed in a more positive manner—as more attractive, more competent and successful, and having greater social status. Perceptions related to African Americans' hair texture have not been studied as systematically, but evidence suggests hair is perceived in a similarly biased manner.

For hundreds of years, skin color or skin tone has played a significant role in the lives and social status of African Americans. “Black history provides considerable evidence that the skin color of African Americans has exerted powerful and persistent influences on societal attitudes toward and treatment of Black persons—within both White and Black cultures”(Bond & Cash, 1992, 879). The treatment of African Americans created for some a skin color bias or made them color conscious. Skin color determined how African Americans were treated and what jobs they were given.

Slaves who were considered lighter-skinned were given jobs and chores that were more respectable inside the house, such as cooking, cleaning, and attending to the children. On the other hand, the darker-complexioned slaves were given more menial jobs, such as working the fields, picking cotton, and laboring manually. After the abolition of slavery, the impact of skin color influenced the lives of African Americans in reference to status and achievement. Social clubs were segregated during this time, which led some prosperous African Americans to organize “blue vein” societies in the early 1900s. They were called this because, to join, the individuals had to be light enough for their blue veins to show through their skin. The requirements to become a member of the club were, thus, certain Caucasoid features. There were other tests that potential members had to pass in order to be accepted into this elite group. An African American had to be lighter than a “paper bag” and be able to pass the “comb test” for what was called “good hair.” To pass this test, the person had to have hair texture straight enough for a comb to pass through it easily (Bond & Cash, 1992).

The privileged treatment given to African Americans who had light skin and other Caucasoid features suggested to many Blacks that “the more they physically conformed to the White, majority standard of beauty, the more rewarding their lives would be” (Gatewood, 1988, 15).

While the majority of the girls do not seem overly concerned with their body image, particularly their weight, they do seem to display a moderate degree of appearance dissatisfaction regarding their hairstyle and skin color.

Perceptions and Preferences for Skin Color ~~PATRICIRAA SKIN

While African American women have been able to successfully ignore the weight ideals advocated by the larger culture, this does not mean that they are immune from eating disorders. In fact the opposite is true. Wilson and Russell (1996, p. 101) found that the rate of obesity among Black women was twice that of White women, especially among poor, working class single black mothers. They suggest that some Black women may use binge eating as a way to cope with poverty. Diabetes and hypertension also become prominent medical risks associated with obesity. Job loss is another related risk factor as well (Wilson & Russell, 1996, p. 101; Thompson, 1996).

As more and more African American communities are becoming exposed to White culture and White norms of beauty, eating disorders are going to grow more and more rapidly.

Skin Color and Body Image Dissatisfaction ~~Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber

Another body image issue that affected the girls in our study was that of skin color. Among African American women, skin color is connected to feelings of self-worth, self-esteem, and attractiveness (Thompson & Keith, 2001). Research has found that most African Americans are partial to skin color that lies somewhere in the middle of the light-dark color spectrum (Clark & Clark, 1980; Robinson & Ward, 1995). This becomes particularly relevant for Black women in that often those who have darker skin feel devalued for not living up to the American standard of light skinned beauty, while those who have a lighter skin tone feel ostracized for being too light, which is synonymous for too White.

Hair and Body Image Dissatisfaction ~~Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber

Perhaps hair, more than any other physical attribute serves to exemplify the beauty struggles faced by African American women. On one hand, hair represents one's assimilation into the popular culture, while on the other hand, it can serve to reject all cultural norms surrounding beauty.

What makes someone ‘Whitewashed?’

Priscilla: The hair

Alright so if you see her wearing her hair too White…

Priscilla: I'll tell her.

What will you say to her?

Priscilla: I'd say, 'Jackie, you're getting a little confused.

Right so when you say they're confused what does that mean? What do they do?

Jackie: Our hair is different than your hair. You need to do different things to it. And some [African American girls] just don't understand that. They think that their hair is White hair and so they can do whatever they want to it.

Like what do they do?

Jackie: Say for instance my hair is like the kind of texture that it is, washing it twice a day would kill it. But some people wash their hair everyday with Pantene.

What makes you have a high self-esteem and what makes it bad?

Teresa: I don't know what makes me have high self-esteem but I know what makes me have low self-esteem.

What's that?

Teresa: People make fun of you.

What do they make fun of?

Teresa: My hair

As the data indicates, hair becomes the symbol for the paradoxical worlds in which African Americans exist. It becomes a venue for displaying their place in both cultures. In this regard, hair that is straightened often becomes the compromise for African American women (Gregory, 1992; Leeds, 1994). African American women when styling their hair must attempt to do so as a means of verifying their roles in both Black and White cultures. Scholar Veronica Chambers (1999, 2001) illustrates this phenomenon by asserting that she has “two relationships with the outside world: One is with my hair, and the other is with the rest of me… Because I am a black woman, I have always had a complicated relationship with my hair (2001, p. 212).” The personal experience Chambers generalizes to the larger African-American female community also came through in our sample.

      

Jen: …these days if you don't have your hair done people are going to laugh at you…because it’s a part of life. You got to maintain your hair, your body, your clothing. You can't be going around looking like a bum.

Why is that? Is your hair more important than your weight?

Jen: For me it is yes. Because your weight is your weight. You were born with it, it's your metabolism. But your hair….God gave it to you but God gave it to you for it to be done. You shouldn't walk around with your hair all over the place because it doesn't look right.

How much time do you spend on your hair?

Jen: As long as it takes… to get my hair braided it takes six, seven hours.

Can you tell me what that's like?

Jen: Like they say you have to go through pain to have beauty, to get your hair braided you have to go through pain…She (HAIRDRESSER) takes some hair and she starts braiding it into your own and she has to make it thick to the edge so it won't come out. She has to braid it tight. It feels like someone hitting your head with a mallet…

Where do you think the idea for braiding comes from?

Jen: I don't know. They say it comes Africa but I really don't know.

Abraham Lincoln's Program of Black Resettlement Part 10

This is a series of posts from the cited paper, I will try to divide it into many parts, put titles, and some illustration to fit in blogger and this Blog.

                      From The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Oct. 1993 (Vol. 13, No. 5), pages 4-25.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    By Robert Morgan 

Impact of the Proclamation

While abolitionists predictably hailed the final Proclamation, sentiment among northern whites was generally unfavorable. The edict cost the President considerable support, and undoubtedly was a factor in Republican party setbacks in the Congressional elections of 1862. In the army, hardly one Union soldier in ten approved of emancipation, and some officers resigned in protest.

As a work of propaganda, the Proclamation proved effective. To encourage discontent among slaves in the Confederacy, a million copies were distributed in the Union-occupied South and, as hoped, news of it spread rapidly by word of mouth among the Confederacy's slaves, arousing hopes of freedom and encouraging many to escape. The Proclamation "had the desired effect of creating confusion in the South and depriving the Confederacy of much of its valuable laboring force," affirms historian John Hope Franklin.

Finally, in the eyes of many people -- particularly in Europe -- Lincoln's edict made the Union army a liberating force: all slaves in areas henceforward coming under federal control would automatically be free.

Crusade for freedom and democracy: 

The Proclamation greatly strengthened support for the Union cause abroad, especially in Britain and France, where anti-slavery sentiment was strong. In Europe, the edict transformed the conflict into a Union crusade for freedom, and contributed greatly to dashing the Confederacy's remaining hopes of formal diplomatic recognition from Britain and France. "The Emancipation Proclamation," reported Henry Adams from London, "has done more for us [the Union] here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor all over this country."

End of the Resettlement Efforts

Lincoln continued to press ahead with his plan to resettle blacks in Central America, in spite of opposition from all but one member of his own Cabinet, and the conclusion of a scientific report that Chiriqui coal was "worthless."

Mounting opposition to any resettlement plan also came from abolitionists, who insisted that blacks had a right to remain in the land of their birth. In addition, some Republican party leaders opposed resettlement because they were counting on black political support, which would be particularly important in controlling a defeated South, where most whites would be barred from voting. Others agreed with Republican Senator Charles Sumner, who argued that black laborers were an important part of the national economy, and any attempt to export them "would be fatal to the prosperity of the country." In the (Northern) election campaign of November 1862, emancipation figured as a major issue. Violent mobs of abolitionists opposed those who spoke out in favor of resettlement.

What proved decisive in bringing an end to the Chiriqui project, though, were emphatic protests by the republics that would be directly effected by large-scale resettlement. In Central America, the prospect that millions of blacks would soon be arriving provoked alarm. A sense of panic prevailed in Nicaragua and Honduras, the American consul reported, because of fears of "a dreadful deluge of negro emigration ... from the United States." In August and September, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica protested officially to the American government about the resettlement venture. (Objection from Costa Rica was particularly worrisome because that country claimed part of the Chiriqui territory controlled by Thompson.)

Worthless kind of people

On September 19, envoy Luis Molina, a diplomat who represented the three Central American states, formally explained to American officials the objections of the three countries against the resettlement plan. This venture, he protested, was an attempt to use Central America as a depository for "a plague of which the United States desired to rid themselves." Molina also reminded Seward that, for the USA to remain faithful to its own Monroe Doctrine, it could no more assume that there were lands available in Latin America for colonization than could a European power. The envoy concluded his strong protest by hinting that the republics he represented were prepared to use force to repel what they interpreted as an invasion. Learning later that the resettlement project was still underway, Molina delivered a second formal protest on September 29.

Secretary of State Seward was not able to ignore such protests. After all, why should Central Americans be happy to welcome people of a race that was so despised in the United States? 

Accordingly, on October 7, 1862, Seward prevailed on the President to call a "temporary" halt to the Chiriqui project.

Thus, the emphatic unwillingness of the Central American republics to accept black migrants dealt the decisive blow to the Chiriqui project. At a time when the Union cause was still precarious, Secretary of State Steward was obliged to show special concern for US relations with Latin America.

Lincoln Proposes a Constitutional Amendment

In spite of such obstacles, Lincoln re-affirmed his strong support for gradual emancipation coupled with resettlement in his second annual message to Congress of December 1, 1862. On this occasion he used the word deportation. So serious was he about his plan that he proposed a draft Constitutional Amendment to give it the greatest legal sanction possible. Lincoln told Congress:

I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.

In this view, I recommend the adoption of the following resolution and articles amendatory to the Constitution of the United States ... "Congress may appropriate money, and otherwise provide, for colonizing free colored persons, with their consent, at any place or places without the United States."

Applications have been made to me by many free Americans of African descent to favor their emigration, with a view to such colonization as was contemplated in recent acts of Congress ... Several of the Spanish American republics have protested against the sending of such colonies [settlers] to their respective territories ... Liberia and Haiti are, as yet, the only countries to which colonists of African descent from here could go with certainty of being received and adopted as citizens ...

Their old masters will gladly give them wages at least until new laborers can be procured; and the freedmen, in turn, will gladly give their labor for the wages, till new homes can be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves ...

The President's December 1862 proposal had five basic elements:

1. Because slavery was a "domestic institution," and thus the concern of the states alone, they -- and not the federal government -- were to voluntarily emancipate the slaves.
2. Slave-holders would be fully compensated for their loss.
3. The federal government would assist the states, with bonds as grants in aid, in meeting the financial burden of compensation.
4. Emancipation would be carried out gradually: the states would have until the year 1900 to free their slaves.
5. The freed blacks would be resettled outside the United States.

Obsessed with weight and still overweight

Superficial fake Shit.

Whether you count the number of people unhappy with their shape, the percentage on a diet, or the billions of dollars spent on diet programs, books, foods and supplements, the figures all show that our society has become more obsessed with weight in the past decade or two than ever before. 

Some argue that we should indeed be paying more attention to our weight to solve the obesity epidemic that threatens our health. Yet research shows that an obsession with becoming thin, contrary to what you might expect, creates more of a health problem.

Obesity researchers often refer to our current culture as a "toxic environment." High-fat, high-sugar food is available everywhere we go. Eating low-nutrient, high-calorie food has become part of how we entertain ourselves, whether we are alone or with others. At the same time, recreation, housekeeping and transportation have all become more sedentary activities.

Hispanics...The choc nutritional.

Yet our culture still values thinness tremendously. Kathy Kater, a psychotherapist who has developed national programs for teaching children about a healthy bodyimage, says that many people today have the sense that they are valued more for how they look than for who they are, and that being thin is essential for the "right" look.

Kater points out that if any of the popular diets of the past 20 years really worked, we wouldn't have so many people overweight now. According to Kater, when we pin our hopes on a fad diet, we are trying to do the impossible. Research shows that when we try to control our eating with external rules, our obsession and preoccupation with food increases. In America where food is so widely available, that's a recipe for overeating.

Instead of making weight loss a goal, Kater advocates focusing on choices that enhance health. She says it's all right to hope for weight loss, but when people consider weight loss the goal, they almost always give up healthier eating and more exercise, if these good habits don't bring the desired weight loss.

Infusion of Super-Slaves genes in females Diet through BJ.

Kater's message for how to improve your body image and handle any weight concern is spelled out at the Web site BodyImageHealth. Her principles emphasize that there are biological limitations to how much we can change size and shape. We should focus instead on choices with health as the goal, resisting society's pressures to be thin, lead sedentary lives and overeat for entertainment.

From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9839386/ns/health-fitness/#.T24ysjEu1X0 Adjusted to  fit this Blog.

Americans 'too fat for x-rays'

Increasing numbers of Americans are becoming too fat to fit into X-ray machines, US searchers report....

The nation's rising obesity problems mean many citizens are not only too large for scanners but they have too much fat for the rays to penetrate.
Over the past 15 years, the number of failed scans linked to patient obesity has doubled, Radiology journal reports.
The problem is not confined to scanners. UK hospitals have had to make their beds stronger for obese patients.

And airlines are designing aircraft to carry heavier loads because passengers are becoming plumper.
Dr Raul Uppot and colleagues, who work in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, had noticed that they were seeing more and more patients whose weight prevented them from having medical scans.
He and his team decided to look back at radiology reports between 1989 and 2003 to see the extent of the problem.
Missed diagnoses
Year on year they saw a small but significant increase in the number of scans that had to be abandoned because the patient was too fat.
Ultrasound images were affected the most because the sound waves need to penetrate the skin and fatty tissue before reaching the organs being examined.
The study authors warned that important diagnoses could be missed if people could not be scanned.
The US government says 64% of the population are overweight.

Hispanics and blacks account for more then 70 % of all overweights in us....