I read this morning the New York Times’ piece on women’s body image which has stirred up some controversy – how Serena Williams’ physique is excellent for tennis, but certain professional tennis players or their coaches were quoted saying they didn’t want such a body, because it made them seem or feel less feminine and attractive. The article did not really mention – and has come under some fire for this – the way race might further complicate this. Once I took an interest in this article, Facebook suggested many others – articles about how Serena Williams makes less in endorsements than Maria Sharapova does, despite Williams’ much more impressive tennis resume.
Race has certainly been on my mind of late, travelling in South Africa, and media stories from the United States about the Confederate flag have kept me thinking about it; and while sitting out a fever in South Africa I watched a match from Wimbledon, and the picture it beamed into South Africa, of beautiful privilege, I found pleasant, but it did make me think. And there have been many articles since the Charleston church shooting about racism, most of them, I think, somewhat stupid – of the “yes you white people are racist” variety.
I think that our sexuality is the key for understanding the problem of race; and this makes sense, because race, as we use the term, is nothing other than different populations of our species which have developed different traits solely because they have not intermingled sexually. For thousands of years this was largely geographical accident; but now there is enough movement of people across the globe that individual attraction and individual choice become part of the equation, and we can see this continued separation of the different races of humanity unfold in our own lives: in the highly intimate facts of who we fall in love with, and who we choose to marry, and who we choose to have children with.
That race plays a large factor in this is obvious. I spoke with a white woman who worked at a big law firm who was clearly upset about something that day. She was speaking with one of her coworkers, who is black, about dating, and this coworker asked her if she filtered her Okcupid dating pool by race (which you can apparently do, and presumably that filter exists because people want it). She said she didn’t, but, this woman told me, she had lied – actually, she did filter out black men. She said she would be fine dating a black man, but she found that there was a cultural difference – they sent very forward messages, they weren’t respectful, etc. Her inbox was too much of a hassle, she said. I just let her talk. It was obvious enough that what was driving her words was a discomfort with the simple fact that race was not only important, it was intimately important – it shaped her love-life, her sex life, and would shape her marriage, and hence the next generation too.
My first response to this is, of course it does. There couldn’t be races if this weren’t true, if this weren’t reenacted with every generation. People who think otherwise don’t know themselves. But I take a relatively scientific attitude towards this, because I am a Christian: I expect that all the problems I see in human society will be found in my heart.
Race is only one factor in the whole complicated business of injustice known as love and marriage and family. I thought about it constantly while single, because I was aware that there were good people around me that I simply wasn’t attracted to, pretty much always for dumb reasons: reasons that won’t mean much when I take leave of my body, and maybe won’t even mean much when I’m old. I know that the beauty of a face or body fades, and I know beauty does not make a person better and often makes them worse, and I know that standards of beauty are culturally and biographically shaped and do not represent God’s view of us – but in the end, few things give me so much happiness as being in the presence of someone I think is beautiful, and not everyone seems beautiful to me.
And so of course people will give up “even” professional success for this beauty – in fact “professional success” is from the individual’s perspective probably just a subset of beauty (of course from the GDP-economics perspective professional success is the only important thing, so anything that cuts into that is considered sinful, a perspective many career-bots will have on this article).
But these questions always make me return to Christianity. I think the real root of all the Christian unease with sex are these truths about ourselves. Christianity tries to make us see with God’s eyes: “there is no slave nor free, no Jew nor Greek, no male nor female, because you are all one in God” – but sexuality is so unlike this that in many ways it is the worst, most unfair thing we do. Money, race, manners, physique, cleanliness, complexion, height, tone of voice, accent, health, humor, use of language, sophistication, movement, clothing, charm (even to the point of being deceptive) – Christianity tells us these things are not the way to measure people, but our bodies respond to them whether we want to or not. And today there is a vast world of advertizing and profiteering which can put dollar values on all these things – so that we know that by this system Maria Sharapova’s lithe blonde body is worth twice as much, in advertizing revenue, as Serena Williams’ thick brown body. “Let the market decide,” economists say. Christianity lodges a complaint against this entire way of thinking, and I think some degree of freedom from it is necessary for our happiness, but we will always, I think, be immersed in it to some extent.
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