The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Khanata pointed out that in Senegal this “mixed” look is treasured. Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed. And many of the Senegalese women take steps—from straightening hair to lightening skin—to get that “Black American/mixed” look. This did surprise me. The one-drop rule had shaped us and then reached across the ocean to shape them, so that even here in Senegal, Pauline was pining for Jean Harlow. Except the Jean Harlow was us. And as I sat there with my lost siblings, listening to Khanata, it occurred to me that the “mixed” look they treasure here is itself a marker of the ordeal, an inheritance of the mass rape that shadows all those DNA jokes I make with my friends. The valuing of light skin was obviously not new to me as a Black American, but to encounter the idea here, to know that even “back home” Pauline would not be safe, was chilling. I had come back to the origin point of all of us to see my lost siblings, the ones who had evaded sale and slavery. But, of course, the warrant had gotten there first.

The reference here is to the character Pauline in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.