Contrasts in Courage 2

Cherokee 

Contrasts in courage are unique ways of being bold about a thing unpopular in the face of potential criticism. Popular culture is fickle, and easily changed by sob stories, intimidation or subtle insinuations bled into the sensibility of being ‘hip’. For a woman of a larger frame, ‘big bone’ as we say in the lexicon of Black Americans, typically in a dress store has had to endure the indignities of clothes made without care, or imagination for her body type. To counter that attack two things have been done in the Black communities I am aware of: take charge of your own identity, or go further and make your own clothes! Washington DC is the Mecca for big bone women. Here and West Africa I learned from watching, being around, and talking to big Black women and absorbing the personal powers they wielded.

In the states I've been to amongst white communities poorer whites have a sound appreciation for the evolving forms of their mothers, wives, and girlfriends bodies, and Central Americans, including Mexicans, enjoy their women’s bodies growing with food, fun, baby carriage, and age. It is the same in Indian country. Perhaps the powerful movement to obsess over weight, and look down upon big women is based on the evolving pretense of women with money and education, and the dance of fashions coming out of Paris, and Milan, and New York City that make those women feel good about being aloof, or better than others.

Perhaps the whole premise of insisting petite women remain the ideal, and anorexia and bulimia as a means to get there is based upon supremacy? I am speculating, of course. Is there any meat, or substance to the course of thought I am riding upon? © Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 2.9.13

Richard Sanchez's Photography