Looking at old black magazines from the 50s-60s, I noticed Light-skinned people were the face of "black" americans, and their was no mention of Africa at all. Today, the opposite appears to be true.When did the change happen?
>>17986869They toured with the Beatles? Neat. I know in their early years the Beatles did some covers of black girl groups (e.g. Please Mr. Postman, She's Got the Devil in her Heart)
The changed happened around the same time that African Americans increasingly reclaimed African symbols.
>>17986869That was in the late 1960s/1970s. There was basically an overall cultural revolution that occurred in Western societies and can be summed up in part as being about "authenticity." It had been common for black Americans (particularly women) to lighten their skin with products that you still see today in India and other Asian countries. What happened was almost Nietzschean in the sense of the "transvaluation of values." Like, society says that being black isn't good, so they began saying black = beautiful and also growing their hair out in the afro style. But I think you have to look at it as part of a broader thing, like rock music of the time with white musicians growing their hair out long. This was the complete opposite of the highly manufactured look of 1950s popular culture. This became political, too. But I see it as part of a shift resulting from the collapse of Fordism. There was a whole thing among the 60s left to criticize the instrumental rationality of technocratic capitalism along with the bureacratic socialism that was dominant in the USSR. There was a popular book at the time by Herbert Marcuse called "One-Dimensional Man." So in this context, these young people growing their hair out were reacting against this sort of cookie-cutter instrumental logic that had been prevailing in the culture, and their alienation with it. In this context you also see a drift into fantasies about third-world guerrillas attacking that order from the outside, people who don't live in the alienating suburbs:https://youtu.be/WUFvY8ZhhlcThen of course, in an irony, you eventually ended up with manufactured hair metal bands in the 1980s. Or that a lot of this "authenticity" stuff actually gets recuperated by the neoliberal order which replaced Fordism.
>>17986869It was a hostile takeover. The genteel Talented Tenth got culturally evicted by the Black Power movement in the late 60s.
1. You’re not black, stop telling me what we think.2. Afrocentrism was big in the late 50s through the 70s as a reaction to what we perceived as being trapped in a society predicated on our degradation. We’d spent the last few centuries being told daily that us and our forefathers were worthless and shameful.
>>17988394>WePost hand + timestamp.
>>17989128Aren't we all assumed to be brown here anyways? Why does one have to prove his blackness?
It sounds strange but I really think there's an analogy to Lucy Liu showing up in Kill Bill. There hadn't really been an Asian-American woman depicted like this in a movie, and young Asian-American girls saw these images and were like, wow. It actually felt empowering to see people like themselves depicted in that way, and if someone said "me so horny" to her, she'd chop their head off. It's about a sense of self-agency.https://youtu.be/DjUi-P4gm6k
