Translator: Nawel Saadoune Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
"Me love me car,
Me love me bike,
Me love me money and ting,
But most of all, me love me browning."
I'm sure you're all very proficient in our Jamaican dialect
and that I didn't need to translate that for you,
but just in case -
that was a very popular Jamaican song that says,
"I love my car,
I love my bike,
I love my money,
But most of all, I love my browning."
Browning,
a term of endearment used in Jamaica to describe those of a lighter skin tone.
The first time I was called browning was when I was three years old.
See, in Jamaica,
many middle-class families have house keepers
who generally didn't have much educational opportunity
but are very dedicated to caring for the children of a family.
So, my housekeeper and I would go on walks,
and she'd look at me and say,
''Amanda, you are the most beautiful child in the community
because you are brown.''
And she'd tell me and my mom that because I was brown,
I was deserving of the best possible care she could give me.
And as I got older,
this concept was never really at the forefront of my mind.
I would hear the term "browning" being used in our music,
from men in the streets and women in hair salons.
And by the time the summer of 2015 rolled around,
I got my first job at a Jamaican restaurant,
a vegan restaurant, actually, called Mi Hungry
in Kingston.
My coworkers were tall with dark-chocolate skin
and intricate long locks because they practice Rastafarianism.
So, on my first day, I eagerly introduced myself:
''Hi, I'm Amanda,''
but very quickly my name became - I'm sure you can guess -
Browning.
See, one day my coworkers were in the kitchen,
making a meal for delivery,
and I hear them having a conversation under their breath,
but I distinctly remember this one line:
''Listen, you can't say that around the browning, man.''
Those words became stamped on my mind:
''You can't say that around the browning."
And this continued to happen every time I went on another one of my summer jobs.
I was nameless.
My identity rested solely upon the fact
that I was lighter skin than the majority of Jamaicans.
Commenting in an interview on his book Outliers,
Malcolm Gladwell explains,
["My mother is a brown-skinned Jamaican.
There are a whole series of advantages rooted deeply
in the peculiar history of Jamaica
that accrue to people who are of mixed race."]
He tells us that, because of British colonialism,
if you were the offspring of a slave and a landowner,
you were freed from slavery because the British were so outnumbered.
This helps to explain
why being mixed or brown in Jamaica does come with a set of privileges.
But here's the thing:
I never felt privileged growing up.
I actually felt ostracized,
but because of the history of colonialism in Jamaica,
I was seen as wealthier, educated, refined.
"You can't say that around the browning"
suggests that when I was in the room,
there was an instinct to move closer toward a perceived standard.
And at the end of that summer, I moved to New York.
It was October 2015,
and my new school's a cappella group was singing for the prince of Serbia
at Le Cirque in Manhattan.
So, as we're waiting to sing,
one of my friends taps me on my shoulder and he says,
''So, Amanda, what is it like being the only African-American in the room?''
It was my second month in America,
so I look around trying to figure out
exactly which African-American Amanda he was referring to.
I'm not African or American.
I'm Jamaican.
But, of course,
this was before shading in the African-American bubble
on most forms and applications became my only option,
before I was asked to speak on every discussion about race,
before I was told I was different from regular African-Americans,
before I was told I didn't know my history
when I didn't know a piece of African-American literature.
See, from that day on,
race began dominating a lot of my conversations,
and being an African-American woman became an identity that I had to embody.
But I didn't have a choice -
people assumed my race for me.
As soon as I stepped off the plane at JFK,
my reality completely shifted.
So, here's a picture of Amanda Taylor in Jamaica;
here's a picture of Amanda Taylor in New York.
Obviously the same person,
so why does my experience differ so greatly in one place versus another?
Colorism, or the practice of discrimination
where those with lighter skin are treated more favorably
than those with darker skin,
persists in many different communities all over the world.
A 2009 report from Global Industry Analysts
declared skin lightening a 10-billion-dollar industry.
In 2012, India alone used 258 tons of this lightening cream.
One study found that in Lagos, Nigeria,
over 77% of residents use this bleaching cream.
So on, clearly, what is a massive scale,
there is an adjustment of self to fit a perceived standard,
regardless of the detrimental effects that this may have.
So, where does it stem from?
Norms.
See, in a lot of situations, norms are useful.
Every concept we have requires a reference point:
a norm.
See, we rank our intelligence, our bodily dimensions, our sex drive
along this invisible line from below to above average.
In the workplace, adults measure their salaries
based on what the average person in their field earns.
Doctors measure their patients' health
based on the average height and weight curves,
and this is totally appropriate.
I mean, if you have a low sex drive,
it might mean that your body isn't producing enough testosterone,
and if you're morbidly obese,
that might mean that you're at risk for heart disease.
Sometimes, we need norms.
So, I'm going to show you a chart.
Just warning you all - it's very scientific, very technical,
so if it gets too difficult, just bear with me.
(Laughter)
So, W. E. B. Du Bois does a great job at explaining these concepts.
The idea is that whiteness is -
okay, just skipped ahead.
We're going to go back.
So, this chart -
there are points of relativity on this chart,
and the closer you are to that point of relativity,
or the closer point of relativity that you are
is the closer you are to the norm.
And so, there are rarely any concepts that we have
that don't try to establish a norm.
And so, when I skipped ahead, this is the idea that I was getting at:
that this desire to establish a norm and fit ourselves to this norm
doesn't just disappear when talking about race.
See, I lived in a country where 97% of the population
is either of partial or total African descent,
and only 0.2% of this population is made up of white people.
Yet 400,000 people of only 2.7 million still bleach their skin.
So, now I'm going to show you another chart,
and as I was saying,
W. E. B. Du Bois does a great job at explaining this concept.
He explains
that because, you know, whiteness is almost invisible
in the sense that it lingers in places where white people no longer are -
and so in the absence of white people, I was the closest point of relativity,
I was the closest physical embodiment of this Eurocentric norm.
Then, I moved to America,
and relative to the norm,
I moved very quickly down the social hierarchy.
Suddenly, no one cared if you could or couldn't say that around the browning.
See, as a black woman in America,
privilege is not a word one would associate with me.
But as a brown girl in Jamaica,
I have to admit
privilege is definitely a word I can use to describe my experience.
And in both places, Eurocentrism remains the norm.
In America and Jamaica, this norm structures our perception of reality
and limits human experience.
And we see this through all generations and centuries.
Norms are unquestioned;
they hold true even when they are ridiculous.
I mean there was a time when we thought that the Earth was flat.
And in the Middle Ages in Europe,
people feared going to hell so deeply
that they could feel the flames licking their feet.
Now, today, many people believe their preconceived notions about race
in the same way we adamantly believed the Earth was flat.
Look, I had my own flat-Earth realizations when I went back home to Jamaica.
I had to constantly remind myself that speaking our dialect, Patois,
did not limit a person's fluency of expression,
that wearing an Afro in an office
did not indicate any more or less professionalism,
that there is beauty in wide hips and full lips.
When I went home, I had a new awareness.
I had to constantly remind myself and check myself.
I had to say to myself
that those tiny assumptions that we make about people
have a ripple effect.
And I became more active in the face of injustice
when I was able to realize where my point of relativity was
in different situations.
And no matter who you identify as,
there is a lot of moral power to be gained
by recognizing yours.
Thank you.
(Applause)