@vdotfdot.bsky.social

In the end, all three works ask the same question: What happens when Blackness is something to escape, perform, or consume—but not honor? Whether it’s passing into whiteness or packaging Blackness for pop culture, the real violence is in the erasure.

Pop culture loves Blackness but only when it’s curated. That’s what makes me think of Doechii and Jude. Both are told they’re “too much.” But maybe the real issue is that they don’t fit into a neat aesthetic for consumption.

Some of the lyrics that represent this idea to me include “Cause you can be anything, anything ‘Cause you can be.” Doechii wants the listener to know that who they are in their blackness is something to be celebrated, and nobody can take that away from them

Doechii isn’t trying to teach you how to understand her. Black Girl Memoir is a refusal of translation. That’s what makes it powerful. It’s not for the white gaze—it’s for the girls who feel like too much and not enough at the same time.

Doechii’s Black Girl Memoir refuses to make Blackness digestible. She leans into complexity. That feels like a direct challenge to the kind of “respectable Blackness” that Stella rejected—and then re-inscribed from the other side.

In “Four Women,” Nina Simone forces you to look at how the world assigns value based on appearance. That’s exactly what’s happening in The Vanishing Half. Skin tone determines access, desirability, safety—even within Black communities.

Kennedy’s relationship with race is built on denial, but it’s also built on confusion. She doesn’t know her history, so she performs a version of identity that’s disconnected. This reminds me of people who cosplay Blackness without any lived understanding

There’s something haunting about how Stella uses her appearance to walk away from Blackness. She doesn’t just pass—she adopts the mindset of whiteness, which allows her to look at her own people as strangers. That’s where the real violence comes in.

They however represent a certain end of the spectrum that is harmful. It makes me think of other political figures who adopt similar values to Stella. People such as Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson. While they are black in skin tone, their policies don’t support their own community.

Even if Stella and Kennedy aren’t black in belief, they still are in identity. Especially in the later half of the book as they come to realize who they truly are. With that being said I think they are still black in their life and experience.

This is something that Nina Simone kind of gets at in her song “Four Women”. The journey of black womanhood is not just one individual story. There are so many different experiences that coexist under one umbrella of identity.

When Stella gives up who she is and passes into whiteness, she is also giving up a piece of who she is. She is giving up community. She is giving up love. And she is giving up the truth. She denies who she is for the sake of something that she already had. She just never realized it.

Stella then adopts a negative mindset to her own people and this is where the harm comes in. The disregarding of her own identity allows her to adopt the mentality of “othering”. As the Walkers move into her neighborhood she can do nothing but seem nervous and hesitant to accept them. (Bennett, 184)

Stella and Kennedy also experience life in a different way on the basis in which they look but for different reasoning. With agency, and the opportunity of ambiguity they choose to forgo their mixed identity and instead pass only as white

In “The Vanishing Half” the main characters of Jude, Stella, Kennedy, all have their life choices influenced by the way that they look. For example because of Jude’s skin color, and the perception it brings, her relationship with Reese is based on mutual understanding of transformation and secrecy.

There exists a combination of different themes within the pieces of media chosen for the readings this past week. One of them that caught my eye was the journey of womanhood, especially for Black women and how their different appearances take control of their experiences through life.

Passing from white to Black just feels like a bizarre obsession with an individual wanting to be able to claim that they are part of a group. For Dolezal, Krug, and the others out there, their actions reinforce the very racial constructs they claim to dismantle. @vdotfdot.bsky.social

As talked about by Darity, the difference is that passing from Black to white was an advancement in society, especially during the 1800’s, it was used to gain power in a country that was so invested into hurting Black people.

Dolezal and Krug’s deliberate alterations of their phenotypic appearance reveals a deeper acknowledgment of race as more than solely a social construct; it is an embodied experience tied to history, struggle, and community. It is ironic they both claim it to be such but then prove themselves wrong

Modern perspectives on passing reflect a shift in the understanding of racial solidarity and allyship. As society has made progress toward accepting and celebrating racial diversity, the expectation has grown that those working for social change should do so without altering their own identity.

This is wrong for many reasons but I do think there is a difference between him and Dolezal and that is a very interesting thing to think about. Griffin was doing it for a momentary period of time, Dolezal wanted to make it her identity.

Something that I’ve also thought about is John Howard Griffin's decision to pass as a Black man in the 1960s in the South. This was a white man who put on a full black face to attempt to understand the Black experience.

This to me begs at another question, what is the difference between appropriation vs appreciation? Obviously in the case of Dolezal that is clearly appropriation to the highest degree. But something like Complex media, where does that fall into?

There exists such high levels and tendency for pop culture to have aspects of black culture. Look at news outlets such as HypeBeast or Complex. These accounts are very current platforms that give information about very cool ongoing events but a lot of posts have to do with black culture in some way.

She is saying that Black people are a certain way. The way that she acts and appears to be, but we know that there is such a spectrum to what Blackness is, and her impersonation of it is very problematic.

While she may claim to want to support the community, her perpetuation of certain stereotypes ends up doing the exact opposite.

They want so badly to be perceived as Black and that is something I just can’t understand. Dolezal has worked for the NAACP so obviously she cares about Black lives, but she could do this as a white woman. That is what I just can’t really understand. Why “switch?”

As weird as it is to say out loud. I think a part of why they are attempting to pass as black is because they think it is “cool” to do so. I say this because the way they pass is so much about their external appearance. They change their hair and voice to be interpreted as such.

Something that the article and my own thoughts have made me think a lot about is the idea of passing into the blackness for social clout. I say this because I think so much of pop culture is black culture. (Darity, 12)