Skin Deep Analyzes: Mark
The first character introduced in the documentary Skin Deep is Mark from Boston. Mark has grown up in an almost all white area for most of his life. He describes his father as having dated views on race and this is shown in a scene where he is having dinner with his family. When the topic of race comes up his father goes on a rate about how whites now a days “don’t owe the blacks anything”(Frances,1995). Mark is different than his family in that he spends his free time he sings at a black church, so he is not completely sheltered. Mark in the beginning is pseudo-independent and reintegration phase of white identity.This is because Mark recognizes racism and is reaching out in certain areas, but he stands by his father’s views which are dated racially.
Mark goes through a racial tolerance program and grows in terms of the racial identity phases defined by Beverly Tatum’s book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”. A defining point in Mark’s transformation is towards the end of the film with a student named Brian who is African American. Brian explains how people of all races need to come together and “stick their neck out”(Frances,1995) for each other when it comes to defending each other racially. Mark has moved into what Tatum has called the Immersion/Emmersion phase. Before he recognized that race is a problem but he was in the pseudo-independent group because he “didn’t quite know what to do about it”(Tatum,2003). Now he has an idea on what to do.
Bibliography
Skin Deep. Dir. Francis Ried. Iris Films, 1995. Videocassette.
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic, 2003. Print.