The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

deva — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:07:18 -0000

"I don't know--within the spectrum of black woemn, I've dated all over the map"

And herein lies the evidence against accusations of sharing the kind of mindset expressed by Kanye, Ne-yo, etc. I don't think it's presumptuous to observe that an exclusive taste for light-skinned or non-black women is all wound up in the history noted above.

As for it cutting both ways, well, it's true that most intelligent, grown-up women don't like to be fetishized, but you should hear little black girls evaluate themselves and each other on a playground - any playground - anywhere in the US (and beyond). I'd wager that 9 times out of 10 they rank themselves, frankly, with a yardstick of self-worth that is both objectified (how pretty we are to boys) and color struck (how light/straight or long-haired and therefore worthy of status).

If one were to parse this study by socioeconomic status, I bet the results would be outrageously depressing.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

deva — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:51:19 -0000

I think the divine Ms. Hill was the big exception to the rule. I remember that a white awards presenter introduced her as "beautiful" at the Grammy Awards when she did that knockout version of Zion and I thought to myself, "well, well, well, ain't that something."

But poor Lauryn cold not carry the mantle. Still, there are glimmers of certain breakthroughs. I don't think that the appreciation of our current first lady -aesthetic, intellectual and moral- is nothing.

I'm just saying these are exceptions and the rule remains.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

pwnbroker — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:48:47 -0000

Agreed with a caveat:

As a consumer of rock music, 16 or 17 at the time, Cult of Personality was a seriously good song. But after buying the album I felt that the rest of the songs, while pretty good, where nowhere near that level of quality. And the Caveat: Vernon Reid was caught by two factors, IMO, in regards to rock god-dom on guitar. 1) Guitar solos and prowess became "passe" to what was hot on the rock radio, and 2) his style was a little ahead of it's time and felt a bit jazzy or prog-rocky for what felt like the vibe of the moment.

I was waaaaay into guitar at the time, but my suburban friends and I (who always felt like we were the target audience of MTV and mainstream marketing, be it true or not) were either going heavier into metal or learning Nirvana and Pearl Jam songs. But Cult of Personality is one of those songs, a timeless classic which transcended the actual band, and at the time we just wanted 9 more tracks just like it, which we didn't get. Their ethnicity made them cooler to us as a novelty, frankly, even though that was indicative of our limited worldview.

And look further into the work of Mike Patton, because Faith no More was okay, but Mr. Bungle is one of the weirdest and most insanely good live acts you'll ever see, and by far the most original music act Ive ever come across. Talk about a charismatic frontman. The album California is a classic work of avant guard music. Do yourself a favor and check it out, it's like the first time you saw Cirque de Soleil.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

LogopolisMike — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:56:09 -0000

I sometimes fear I'll get tired of writing this, and you sure seem humble enough that you'd get tired of reading it, but I'm writing it anyway:

Damn, this was a great post.

Having discovered it before I'm headed out on a Friday night, I'm going to have to bookmark it because I'm certain that commenters will have goodness to add, so I'll come back to read you later. I just wanted to thank you for your perspective and the clarity with which you express it. I love it.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

adamnvillani — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:33:59 -0000

For the record, yeah, I'm white and never heard the term "redbone" used for light-skinned blacks before.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

adamnvillani — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:25:34 -0000

Yeah, I don't listen to hardly any R&B, but I could tell you that a lot of white music fans treat the Grammys as a big joke. Remember when Jethro Tull won the first "Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal" album? Remember when Paul McCartney got nominated for Best Alternative Album?

The list of performers who never won Grammys, or only won them late in their careers, long past their best stuff, is far more prestigious than the list of those who did win.

And that's not speaking from a hipper-than-thou Indie Rock perspective; I'm talking about big, mainstream rock groups like The Who and Led Zeppelin. Eric Clapton and Carlos Santana never won until decades after their prime.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

klg19 — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:34:41 -0000

Yeah, sorry, I'm still not seeing the connection to what I said. Help me out?

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

klg19 — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:33:47 -0000

Ah. Point taken.

But it still goes to explain why he might not feel the need to flog the book much in his posts.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

tbs — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:36:15 -0000

Huh. Back in Texas, Oklahoma, & Louisiana, light skin was often called "bright".

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

tinisoli — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:21:22 -0000

"getting rid of racial variation to end racism is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

Not really, because racial variation of the kind we're speaking of isn't necessary for humans to exist. It isn't meaningful except in the context of these systems we've constructed to feel good and bad about it (culture). Therefore, losing variety (as we know it now) would be quite harmless. I think you are envisioning actual people being tossed off the Earth in my beige future (like a baby tossed out with bathwater), but all I'm talking about is people looking more alike one another than they do now in terms of skin color and some other traits, and reproductive trends being different than they have been in recent centuries as cultures mingle, economies go global, borders open, and people rise above tradition. Lamenting the non-existence of really dark people, really white people, really short people, really tall people, whatever, it pretty silly because we'll still have people. The baby will not have been thrown out at all. It'll just look different than it would have if we all kept mating and marrying within our different groups. So what?

In any event, I'm not advocating forced miscegenation as a means of ending racism. I'm just saying that racism becomes impossible when discerning one's race——or compiling observations into some kind of reliable conclusion about a person's origins——becomes impossible. In truly diverse places people are already finding that their race radar is pretty unreliable, to the point that they just ditch it entirely. A friend of mine who lived on the island where I was in the Peace Corps ended up marrying a PCV and moving to Florida. Most people there figured he was Hispanic, so he was constantly greeted with "Que pasa?" Meanwhile, non-white American volunteers on the islands were presumed to be from Japan, India, Africa, etc., and when the islanders found out otherwise they realized how useless their racial/nationality radar was. If it becomes common for people to get these identifications wrong, and it becomes impossible to assume anything, then we'll just knock it off.

The "race draft" that Dave Chapelle did on his show was so brilliant because it exposed how impossible and meaningless the whole business is. And that's after a relatively short time of, and relatively few cases of, actual interracial mating.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

Faivel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:16:10 -0000

In Karen's defense, many, if not most white folks are aware of the skin-color prejudice amongst black people -- not just from School Daze, but from Otis Redding's bragging about his "real fair skin", from Mingus' autobiography Beneath the Underdog (a brilliant book, if you've never read it), from Langston Hughes, from a thousand sources.

It's just that most of us never made that distinction ourselves. It's sort of like women and shoes: most guys, in my experience, don't really notice what shoes a woman's wearing -- but other women do. Many social norms, including some of the harshest, are established and enforced by the group in question -- sometimes in response to outside pressure, and sometimes not.

Look at it this way: the "one drop" rule wouldn't make sense if (some) whites recognized degrees of blackness the way (some) black people do.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

cocolamala — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:13:38 -0000

i missed this comment before replying below...

i think that we're close to being on the same page here, i just want to emphasize that the cause and effect should be set in the proper order.

beige future could be an effect of ending racism, not the other way around. because you still could move towards a beige future while leaving racism intact.

but there will always be outliers (even when everyone is close to the same shade) and those people will need to be accepted in the far future regardless of their skin tones. even before the races were differentiated, the genetic potentials existed in our ancestors and did pop up within those populations.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

cocolamala — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:40:48 -0000

"if those people date interracially..."

that's a big if...

because some people are still going to chose partners of the same race based on culture, or shared experiences, or love, or money, (or health insurance), or whatever factors...

i don't think interracial partnership is a goal in and of itself. we should not be barred from dating interracially, but should not be forced to do it either.

the girl who marries the boy next door who is also the same race (because we still live in segregated communities) is going to have kids of that existing racial category. how do they fit into the beige future?

getting rid of racial variation to end racism is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

cocolamala — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:27:22 -0000

you can look at an average african american family and still see a range of light and dark skinned people

you can look at an hispanic family and see that as well

as long as there are still light and dark skinned people, we will need to wrestle with dealing with difference

we need to learn to deal with differences because people will always be able to find some reason to discriminate between individuals because of their features.

you would think the universal human experience that defines us all as people: who create cultures and civilizations, sciences, and art forms, histories and literature -- would be enough similarity for us to stop caring about superficial differences between melanin levels or the amount of spiral in your hair -- but we persist in the face of all that common experience.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

tinisoli — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:16:55 -0000

"even when light and darked partners do choose each other, their children do not necessarily look uniformly mixed in-between racial categories."

You're not looking far enough into the future. Yeah, if you take a dark black woman and have her mate with a really white white guy, there will be a great deal of variety in their offspring. But that's just on generation. If those offspring mate across racial lines, and so do their offspring, and on and on and on, you WILL NOT SEE some of the traits that you listed above. You will get less variety, because of dominance, codominance, and incomplete dominance.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

tinisoli — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:12:29 -0000

Cocomala,

I replied to your previous comment at the end of the main thread.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

cocolamala — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:10:53 -0000

really the last thing,

even when light and darked partners do choose each other, their children do not necessarily look uniformly mixed in-between racial categories.

some kids are born lighter, some are born darker, some are in between. some have kinky hair, some have green eyes. some have full lips and noses, others have different features.

Genetic variety is not like going to McDonald's and ordering a predictable shape or form.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

tinisoli — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:05:35 -0000

I agree that the "beige future" is rather far off, especially if the growth rate of interracial mating doesn't skyrocket.

I also agree that it sure would be nice if we got rid of prejudices in the meantime.

And I agree that even in a beige future, people might focus on minute differences in the shade of beige, just as they do with different shades of white and black (and others) right now.

But I disagree that the beige future would involve any one race disappearing or "removing the dark-skinned people." The whole point is, if the races actually crossed each others' cultural borders and mated in a more random fashion, and populations were not isolated as they have been for centuries, then the common phenotype would eventually be intermediate and the extremes would become very uncommon. The really dark-skinned phenotype might vanish, but so would the really white phenotype, along with some other traits. If we're willing to let go of our racial pride and vanity, then nobody should give a rat's ass if the more extreme phenotypes are no longer prevalent in the distant future. I think you may be envisioning a whole swath of humanity being deliberately bred out of existence, when in reality it would just be the inevitable product of evolution——changes in allele frequencies over time——with the more extreme phenotypes fading from view. But of course events in the future could change all that, anyhow, and in 5000 years we could be back to our current color scheme.

I married someone of a different "race," and we had a kid this year. Years ago there may have been a part of me that desired to see myself and some of my recessive traits in my kids. If that desire hadn't been dismissed, I probably would've sought a mate who looked like me, and my kid might have blue eyes instead of brown, or whatever. But that shit really doesn't matter. I understand that having pride in one's phenotype and one's race may be a necessary reaction to racism and prejudice, but it's still vanity and it's still pride. Now, I don' think people should go out of their way to marry someone of another race, but if we cut out the prejudice AND cut out the vanity and pride, we'd see a hell of a lot more of it.

By all means, let's just do away with prejudice. I'm just saying that if racial traits aren't discernible then it's a lot harder to discriminate.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

cocolamala — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:01:35 -0000

okay, one more comment

even if the beige future were to happen, how could it come about?

1. Racism ends: "black is beautiful" becomes a universally accepted fact, exactly every light skinned person picks a dark skinned person for a partner and the next generation is uniformly mixed.

2. Racism continues: "if you black, get back" persists, light skin privilege persists, and dark skinned men and women do not get chosen as partners as frequently as light skinned men and women. Fewer and fewer darker skinned children are born over a period of time.

How can you enforce a mandate that light and dark partners choose each other? If you can't do that, then how can you believe that no darker or lighter skinned children will continue to be born in the beige future?

There is going to be variation. Having varied skin tones/features came before the idea to discriminate based on them. We need to get rid of the ideas of racism, not the genetic variety of humanity.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

jeffe — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:49:40 -0000

The sidebar doesn't show up if you read the blog through a reader.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

cocolamala — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:21:04 -0000

I understand the migration of peoples out of africa, upwards of 6,000 thousand years ago.

However, I don't think this "beige vision of the future" is projected out thousands of years-- i think people are talking in terms of hundreds of years, especially if you're talking about altering the racial makeup/politics of western civilization.

Looking back at the last 2000 years of Western civilization/history, you can see that people have been mixing it up in the middle east/mediterranean/south asia for a long time -- but folks still discriminate amongst who is south asian/arab/mediterranean/northern african/egyptian.

even in mixed societies like arab societies, where ppl are currently beige-ish, there are still racial distinctions based on the idea that light skin is more desireable.

in homogenous populations/ethnicities, like Europe or Japan, people still discriminate between Northern and Southern Europeans based on perceived skin color (heck, even between Northern/Southern Italian). People still want to know if you're a light skinned Japanese person or a member of the darker skinned minority.

my point is, that everyone is not currently, and will not be one, uniform color.

If we were, would it mean that we removed prejudice against dark skinned people?

Or that we just removed the dark skinned people?

(removing prejudice actually helps end racism. seeking to erase our various shades of skin color actually accomplishes the opposite goal)

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

janinedm — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:37:39 -0000

I just meant that it's strange to me to hear this treated as news when there was a movie that had dance numbers on the subject 21 years ago.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

Rainy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:00:05 -0000

I don't know what the deal is with my upbringing but I have never heard of anyone being called 'redbone'. The only time I ever heard anybody mention that I had a dark complexion was from one of my friends in high school. When she started going around point out who was was light and who was dark. I was confused. I asked her what is the point. She just said 'because'. Nobody in my family ever talked about this kind of stuff. My family just completely avoided silliness like that among other things.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

pdub — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:54:03 -0000

Redbones is about the best BBQ the yankees (not the pinstripe kind) are capable of. (wipes the sauce off his chin)

But I second that, before today the term 'redbone' was not in my white dictionary; I'd have thought that Malcolm X might have mentioned it in his Autobiography. And I agree with Karen above - the discussion of gradations of skin tone and the strong emotions it conjures up always surprises me. I guess it shouldn't.

Re: Light-Skin Brothers Making A Comeback

thewayoftheid — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:23:53 -0000

LOL. True. Diddy is the Career Killer, farreal.