Darkness, darkness, be my pillow

This was originally written a long time ago.  My nephew is in college now and my niece is headed there next year:

Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head, and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your dream
            -Jesse Colin Young

A list of just a few things, better when dark, or black:

Fertile earth
Shadow
Star-viewing night sky
Ebony wood
Ink
Little black dress
Sable
Charcoal
Judicial robes
Black belt
Being in the black (financially solvent)
Being in the black (in fire suppression, being in a safe zone that is already burned)
Limousines

When I was a little brown-haired child, growing up among the blond crowds in Minnesota, I wanted to be blonde.  I fell asleep praying to an indifferent god to turn my hair yellow overnight, to cure a family friends kid who had polio and to keep my family safe.  In that order.  All around me, I saw messaging that to be blonde, to be lighter, was better.  Aesthetically, morally better.  The blondes in stories always fared well, angels in religious art were almost universally golden-haired.  The slogan "blondes have more fun" was omnipresent, and there was  an as yet inexplicable association of dark haired girls with evil, or plainness, and light-haired girls with desirability - in a way that somehow assured survival life's trials.

As an adult, I came to understand  that there are powerful cultural biases associated with darkness.  These biases appear in eastern and western, ancient and modern cultures.  Darkness is associated with evil, and to be dark is to be bad.  Troubling also is the fact that some subcultures fetishize darkness, co-opting cultural practices that have African origins, or underscoring the association of darkness with evil or danger, like some popular comic-book characters. Dark clothing or dark appearance often is a shorthand way to establish the "bad-boy" or "bad-girl" tropes - alluring but dangerous. 

I took this very personally as a kid, and always sought out positive associations with darkness.  A grade school classmate I think felt this also - his last name was Brown. Once our class was asked to write a poem about a color.  I wrote about brown, all positive things - wet tree bark, fragrant earth, chocolate cake, rugged bear and soft fawn.  I remember him ducking his head while I read, embarrassed perhaps to think he may have been singled out by the weird girl in class.  Or maybe he hadn't thought about his name that way before and was pleased.  But honestly, I wasn't thinking about him - the poem was about my own brown hair.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about brown skin, like my Colombian-born nephew and niece. I don't really know what it is like for my nephew to be concerned about proper behavior if he is stopped by police - but I hate it that for him a traffic stop may mean either life or death, and merely driving poses a risk.

It's true that there is something primal about the fear of the dark for animals like us who can be prey. That is an honest, no-fault fear that I understand. It must also be the place where the dark-light bias originates.  Humans all over the world beat back the night with artificial light. But in truth, much of that lighting amounts to displays of ego and wealth meant to impress, not protect. It seems to me that humans have overcome the visceral fear of the dark, and it is only situationally legitimate.

The lyrics above, and these writers' works defy the dark-is-bad trope:

But when I lean over the chasm of myself - 

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches 

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

Rilke - The Book of a Monastic Life

 

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra

 

In the dark I rest,

unready for the light which dawns

day after day, eager to be shared.

Black silk, shelter me.

I need 

more of the night before I open

eyes and heart

to illumination.  I must still 

grow in the dark like a root

not ready, not ready at all

Denise Levertov - 

What would it take to smash this bias? The "Black Lives Matter" and "Dark Skies" movements have momentum and support, but the depth of the bias is evident in the strong pushback each receives.  Symbols like the flag of the Confederacy, and statutes erected to honor slavers are coming down. Chipping away at these symbols shows that maybe humans can shift the paradigm.