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Photo: Coqueran/FameFlynet Pictures

We haven’t talked about this at great length yet but I’d been thinking about Zoe Saldana’s comments about race in recent interviews (BET and Allure) she’s done to promote the new Star Trek film. I don’t know. The key problem in Zoe’s comments seems to be rooted in the fact that she doesn’t seem to be surrounded by a cadre of people who speak in a language that engages in the complexity of being brown and woman in America. She’s a young actress and her publicist, undoubtedly, has coached her in the language of comfortability, something that ensures that she gets hired for more acting jobs that transcends race, right?

On race
:

I find it uncomfortable to have to speak about my identity all of the time, when in reality it’s not something that drives me or wakes me up out of bed everyday. I didn’t grow up in a household where I was categorized by my mother. I was just Zoe and I could have and be anything that I ever wanted to do…and every human being is the same as you. So to all of a sudden leave your household and have people always ask you, “What are you, what are you” is the most uncomfortable question and it’s literally the most repetitive question. I can’t wait to be in a world where people are sized by their soul and how much they can contribute as individuals and not what they look like.

On code/switching:


I literally run away from people that use words like ethnic. It’s preposterous! To me there is no such thing as people of color cause in reality people aren’t white. Paper is white. People are pink, it’s a bit ridiculous when I have to explain to a human being, that is an adult like I am, that looks intelligent but for some reason I have to question his intelligence and explain to him as if he was a two year old, my composition in order for him to say, “Oh I guess I can chill with you, I can work with you.” I will not underestimate a human being and I will not allow another human being to underestimate me. I feel like as a race, that’s a minute problem against the problems we face just as women versus men, in a world that’s more geared and designed to cater towards the male species.

That is a situation that, I spend time thinking about, and working towards ending that, I guess we could talk about that

As black people, it often feels as if it is our job to make white people comfortable around the diversity of black experience and identity, with white people barely meeting us halfway. Because white people in America would like black people to transcend race, lest they be forced to accept the responsibility of looking at their role in perpetuating assumptions about the meaning and value of brown bodies in America.

In an interview for the June issue of Allure Magazine, Zoe Saldana made this statement: 

“…to be an American or black or Latina, it’s arbitrary compared to our battles as women.” The strange logic in Saldana’s remarks above, however, lives in this line of establishing a hierarchy among struggles. That being a woman supercedes race and ethnic identities. If she identifies as woman first, perhaps it somehow erases the fact that she is brown, a blend of heritages that majority white Americans fail to comprehend. That brown is synonymous with something less, inferior to gender struggles. It’s as lightening rod for most feminists of color, certainly for us feminists of the African Diaspora, when such a hierarchy of oppressions is made. It’s why we of a certain generation opted for the term ‘womanist’ in lieu of ‘feminist,’ because it included the narrative of our struggles of having to navigate in this culture with multiple identities. Every day involves a very quick code/switching computation of what my body says in spaces where I’m the singularity–woman or black. I’m darker skinned too, so I don’t get the luxury in majority white spaces to turn off race until I open my mouth and the intonation of my words communicates educated, thoughtful, strength. It’s how we signal that we are not to be fucked with and that we are to be respected for the opinion we offer in professional worlds.

It’s why we are all so enamored with Olivia Pope, with her flaws (in her personal life) and perfection (in her professional life). We know her. Some of us are Olivia; it’s why we root for her. We don’t get to see her on TV very often, but we most definitely have seen her in various professional universes. The camp and high Dynasty salacious drama of Scandal aside, America needs to see a brown woman in command and solving problems in a high-pressure environment.  Read More »

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