Is He Comfortable in His Own Skin?

Is He Comfortable in His Own Skin?

The ability to not only accept the history of ones race, but also take on the obligation to paint the view of one’s race in a positive light, is extremely complicated for a minority student in America; especially a Black one.

Gordon, a student at the University of California-Berkley, is one example of a student immersed in a stage of racial identification defined in Beverly Tatum’s work Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria.

Gordon begins his place in the film Skin Deep with: “All they want to see is that they admit “X” amount of Blacks, Latinos, so on and so forth. After that they don’t care about you… There are no support groups,” (16:20). He’s at a stage where the struggle of being a black human being is real. However, despite this, he is determined to beat the odds, not only for himself, but in order to make known the struggle to the world.

The transformation Gordon made, even just during the film proves that he belongs in the fourth stage because he has expressed the will to “establish meaningful relationships across group boundaries with others, including Whites, who are respectful of this new self-definition,” (Tatum 76). Gordon hasn’t quite made it to the fifth stage because it doesn’t seem like he’s “found ways to translate a personal sense of racial identity into ongoing action expressing a sense of commitment to the concerns of Blacks as a group,” (Tatum 76).

During the discussions one point that was made repeatedly was that students couldn’t make up for what their ancestors did. Though justified, Gordon changes the view and sets the stage for the opening up of raw feelings when he says, “Things are happening now. Slavery still exists.” (26:00)

 

 

Works Cited

Reid, Frances, Sharon Wood, Sarah Cahill, Michael Chin, Stephen McCarthy, Deborah Hoffmann, and Mary Watkins. Skin Deep. Berkeley, CA: Iris Films, 1995.

Tatum, Beverly D. “why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race. New York: BasicBooks, 1999. Print.