Just like in last week's reflection when I discussed Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston is one of my top comfort artists, and my mother and I both idolize. I can remember back when she died my mother crying in her room and every year when the day came around my mother became a little sadder each time. I was too young to understand at the time how the music industry her, a black woman in the white pop world which eventually led to her sad untimely death. She was another artist who helped me stay true to my own identity as a black woman.
Even in Marla Shelton's article, Whitney is Every Women?: Cultural Politics and the Pop Star, she describes Houston as a "symbolic mulatto icon" and a representation of the integration of white and black America. She had so much pressure placed upon her shoulders during a sensitive time after the Civil Rights movement. She was both rejected and accepted from the black and white communities though. She had a carefully designed image and was treated like a puppet and people frowned down upon her for trying to fit into the white community and never being fully accepted in the white pop world because of the color of her skin. In her movie The Bodyguard, she faced criticism on both fronts for being black and starring alongside a white co-star.
When I originally came to Northeastern, I tried to fit in with the people I had grown up around for most of my life but I found myself not fitting into the pre-cut molds that were college cliques. I tried the National Black Student Association but I never sit quite right and the white friends I made never truly understood the simple things I went through on a day-to-day basis as a black girl. When I continually ran into problems with my identity and self-esteem artists like Whitney Houston always reminded me that the greatest love of all is learning to love yourself.