Women of Color, Your Bodies Aren’t Wanted Here

I know June is Pride Month, Black Music Month, Celibacy Awareness Month, International Men’s Month and National Soul Food Month. I didn’t know that it was Women of Color Please Go Away Month, too.

Three events are already marking the month. First, a white female teacher in Seattle, WA told an 8-year-old black student — the only student of color in the class — that the child’s hair product made her “sick.” She ejected the child in front of her classmates and sent her to another class, one filled with more black students. The child’s parents have since consulted a lawyer and refused to return the child to the school, which claims that the incident was about the teacher’s “health,” not about racism. (The NAACP is filing a complaint on behalf of the student with the U.S. Department of Education.)

Even if the Seattle teacher had allergies, as the school claims, allowing a teacher to tell a black child that she can't stand her hair supports idea that black hair is ugly because it’s not considered “natural” by dominant beauty standards. Meanwhile, sending the child to a class filled with other black children reinforces the idea that her “natural” place is with people “of her own kind.”

Then there's the notorious case of Debrahlee Lorenzana — a Latina and former employee at Citibank in New York City — who says she was fired from the company because her face and figure were “too distracting” to her male co-workers. Bosses made “off-handed comments” about the way she looked, says Lorenzana's lawsuit. According to her, her bosses forbade her from wearing “turtlenecks, pencil skirts…fitted suits…and three-inch heels.” Meanwhile, her supervisors advised her “to wear make-up” because she “looked too sickly” without it and suggested that she shouldn’t show up to work without first straightening her curly hair.

Currently, Lorenzana's case is going through an arbiter. Meanwhile, much of the media persists in painting her as a “sexy Latina” whose mere body and voice can stop the capitalist machine — and the people literally manning the machine — from functioning. Therefore, the argument goes, she deserved to get fired from her job, even if that means being deprived of a livelihood to support her child.

And then there's the case of Jarretta Hamilton, a black woman who taught at a Christian school in Florida before her boss fired her after pushing her to admit that she'd become pregnant three weeks before getting married in 2009. Hamilton and her partner (who's white) are not only suing the school for violating federal anti-discrimination laws, they're also suing for lost wages and emotional damage caused by how the school informed Hamilton’s students (and their parents) that she was fired for "fornicating" with her husband while he was still her fiance.

Even if the school where Hamilton taught had a “moral” code for the teachers, her dismissal reinforces the idea that she's a black woman who was "not able to control” her reproductive — and by implication, her sexual — self, an all-too familiar stereotype.

Of course, there are those who will want to see these cases as “isolated incidents.” But thanks to a media that consistently views women of color (and our bodies) in narrow ways that many of us are forced to encounter in our daily lives, unfortunately, these are hardly exceptions. Rather, they're just further examples of how too often, our physical beings — our natural hair, our figures, our reproducing bodies are viewed as disturbing or threatening.

Heck of a way to commemorate a month.

Photo Credit: Tony Armstrong