Dark is Not A Feeling
‘…there are very specific feelings and ideas that we are generalizing under the blanket, imprecise, and racist imagery of “darkness.”‘
We see anti-blackness in our visual language but not in our figurative language. In July 2019, the YouTube kids’ channel My Pingu TV had one of its cartoons pulled for racist messaging given the moral crux of the episode, “Dina And The Prince,” concerned its young white heroine becoming a Black woman to symbolize forsaking her beauty for a greater good. The idea was quickly admonished as racist and removed from the platform —But if Dina had simply condemned herself to an eternal “dark” place away from the “light” of her prince and others, without changing her skin color, would we have cornered the racism in that idea?
The figurative language of anti-blackness is most commonly illustrated by contrasting extremes, such as our “light” and “dark” descriptions of what is “good” and what is “evil”—what is order and what is “other.”
Duality (or contrasting extreme) narratives put us in a place similar to that of the “black-looking” princess, in which we pursue or exist within an ideal condition of “light” and regress to an opposite condition of “darkness.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About The Dark—
When we talk about darkness as a feeling or a place, we are talking about hurt and subversive physical and psychological spaces that one does not really want to examine but with superstitious touch. In other words, there are very specific feelings and ideas that we are generalizing under the blanket, imprecise, and racist imagery of “darkness.”
Given the ADF (African dramatic form) control Dramatic Mask, a key to managing and crafting our audience is ensuring that if we don’t want a thing mistaken, must make it clear: Our writing is more precise, more interesting, and more authentic when we make the effort to understand what we are trying to say and then make it clear (incidentally subverting deep racist psychology in the process). Great writing is in the details.
Previous: The Problem of Anti-Blackness in Our Literal and Literary Imagination