House Niggas...Field Niggas. Amongst America's oldest rivals. For those who are not in tune with the situation I'll quickly explain. During slavery blacks were separated into two groups; the slaves on the field and the slaves who lived in the house(hence the titles field nigga...house nigga.) The slaves on the field worked harder and were treated worse, they were also typically of darker complexions. The house slaves were not treated as bad, they worked domestically mostly cleaning and cooking. Often the house slaves were lighter and in some cases they were the offspring of their slave masters. The slaves in the field resented the slaves in the house because of the privileges bestowed upon them, and the slaves in the house disliked the field slaves, and believed that they were in fact superior to the field workers because of their fair skin and their relationship with the master. Slavery ended in 1865. Unfortunately much of this mentality lives on today.
Black people (like or not) are still separated. It is getting better, but their is still a divide. The notion that dark skin is inferior to lighter still exist (no matter how many straight to DVD releases star Morris Chestnut or how many times us dark skinned people chant "The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice" the idea still remains. But in the past this situation has been looked at very narrowly, dark skinned people do not bare the burden of this issue alone. Many fair skinned people feel alienated and in some cases discriminated against by dark skinned people who assume that their light skin is an indicator that they believe themselves to be superior. How do we solve this problem??? Is the gap too wide??? Is the history to deep for us to mend??? Must we remain a culture of people separated by envy and stereotypes??? I say the answer to that lies with us!!!!
The first step to solving the dilemma is that we need to be honest about the problem. IT IS A PROBLEM!!! IT DOES EXIST!!!! It's easier to sweep these things under the rug to forget about them because they make us uncomfortable, to continue trying to live our lives while others are suffering underneath that same rug and since we are one, hurting our own selves simultaneously. We have to communicate about these issues. And we have to try to understand each other.Everybody has a story so we cannot be so quick to judge.
The second step is asking ourselves why we have these issues. Why after all these years of progress and struggle, we still make comments like he or she is too dark, their nose and/or lips are too big,their hair is too coarse???? or comments like She is too light!!!!, he looks white!!!!Why do we still have reservations about loving ourselves, in all of our hues and shapes. We can say that it's the slave masters fault. We can blame his preference for light skinned people, in who he saw traces of himself...but we have the responsibility to move past whatever may have happened in the past. We have to stop buying into these ideas!!!!! And finally the truth is I don't think white people generally care whether a black person is light or dark...I highly doubt that having light skinned saved anyone for being lynched!!!! Light skinned people, though some were in the house, were slaves too, like the rest of the "niggas."
