Azizi: Your post of 21 May 07 - 07:46 PM is bringing into focus something, which probably helps to explain the way I felt about "Betty's" case. At the time, a friend of hers remarked, "She doesn't even think of herself as being black." You and Peace have a point there, as Peace illustrated in his pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi. In the case of the former, we tend to think of his "being Black" as a defining characteristic of his identity. Only a Black man could have experienced or known what he did.
What was so upsetting about Betty's case, was that the first time her attention was brought to the way she looked (while at college), it was for such a horrible, destructive reason.