When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Anatomy of a Fairy Princess

© Bernestine Singley 173 Anatomy of a Fairy Princess Patricia J. Williams “What’s a radical-left black single-mother intellectual like you doing reading O?” asked an unusually annoying friend of mine who knows exactly how to make me defensive. “I subscribe,” I said evenly. “Why?” he asked and made a face. I threw popcorn at him as he beat a hasty retreat. Why indeed, I thought, as I settled into an article about the mathematically unlimited ways to accessorize the same blouse and skirt over the course of a week. Hadn’t I read this someplace before? And what has it got to do with the national crises about which I usually write—suspect profiling, the death penalty, eugenics, human rights? The truth is that I buy O, The Oprah Magazine, for an accumulation of little reasons, not one of which is earthshaking, but which together allow me a comfortable moment of the mundane. 174 P at r i c i a J . W i l l i a m s The attractiveness of the comfortably mundane—I suppose that says more about me than it does about black women in general. But our culture teeters crazily between exceptionalizing and sensationalizing us on the one hand and, on the other, rendering us ugly and invisible. This is deeply wearying. In a land generally given over to the cult of appearances , it is harder and harder for anyone—male, female, minority or not—ever to just walk through the day unselfconsciously. Add that to the ingrained hierarchies of racism, and black women end up categorized in ways that never allow us to feel casually normative. When I was in college, living in those just-post-adolescent pressure cookers called dormitories, I marveled that most of my white friends struggled with the fear of looking like everyone else. My black friends and I, on the other hand, struggled to “fit in,” tending to find the middle ground of “ordinary” something of a relief—even a luxury. This is a purely anecdotal observation, I admit, but it makes me wonder about the source of such social forces—and how they shape us. For me, the paradox of African American attempts to become mainstream is that the very rituals of proving that we are “just like” the girl next door are themselves the proof of our marginality. Back in college, we worried about women’s magazines selling fewer copies every time they put a black model on the cover. Hopeful little sisterhoods all over the country would run out to buy the occasional copy of Glamour or Elle just because a black face had been sighted on the supermarket news rack—always in the tenacious belief that our pumping up sales would “show them” that black beauty is no less than white. Twenty-five years later, little has changed at those magazines; the sisterhoods grew tired long ago, many abandoning the quest for integration with the advent of Essence. If the world were a different place, I suppose I might join those who have sneered that O is just another yearning-for-a-middle-classlifestyle magazine like Martha Stewart Living. But however obvious the similarities may be, for me the distinguishing feature of O is its visualization of a mixed society as “normal.” I don’t mean that it’s colorblind. Rather, it purposefully arranges people like bouquets of wildflowers. People with differing looks, opinions, tastes, and ages are put side by side to ruminate about random things—marriage, money, books, etc. A n at o m y o f a F a i ry P r i n c e s s 175 It’s equalizing in a very quiet sense, this pictorial impression that the soap opera of life’s little issues touches everyone. Of course, I still read Foucault and Jet and the kinds of New Yorkbased political journals that keep me testy and sarcastic. But O, for all of its aromatherapeutic take on life, is the most integrated magazine on the American market. Yes, it serves up calculated fantasy, is studiously apolitical, and is rather long on fluff, but where else can you find images of women who are black, white, Asian, large and small, mothers, wives, singles and sisters, braided, dreadlocked, and hot-combed, on a budget or with Oprah’s money to spare—all just girlfriends together? Then too, I like O because Oprah Winfrey...