I was watching The Last Dragon last night, and joking with Kenyatta about Vanity. Man, the whole neighborhood had it bad for her. We were in the middle of that scene where DeBarge does "Rhythm Of The Night" and Vanity sings "Seventh Heaven." (Kenyatta kept yelling "She's horrible!" And yeah, she basically was. Fine as hell, but no Aretha.) Anyway we were talking about how yellow was thing back then. It's standard business these days for black actors to note their "exotic" lineage ("Such and such has French, Cherokee, Aleutian and Martian ancestry...") but back then everyone, it seemed, wanted to look, and claim to be, biracial.
I'm talking about people who I worship today, and half-worshiped then--Mike, Prince, DeBarge etc. I'd watch their videos, and it wasn't just the personal optics that offended, it was the multi-racial cast--the whites, the Asians, the Latinos etc. (Yeah, mostly the whites.) I think so many of us grew up in neighborhoods where there wasn't that sort of diversity and we believed that the pulsing heart of American music was there on the block, and anything that didn't pledge fealty to the block, wasn't "real" music.
There's a passage in my book where I try to explain the appeal of hip-hop (circa '88), from the perspective of people who feel like their heroes are compromising themselves in order to get heard:
Niggers were on MTV in lipstick and curls, extolling their exotic quadoons, big-upping Fred Astaire and speaking like the rest of us didn't exist. I'm talking S-curls and sequins, Lionel Richie dancing on the ceiling. I'm talking the corporate pop of Whitney, and Richard Pryor turning into the toy.We felt--I felt--that these guys were taking our music, but not taking us. And so when hip-hop started cresting into it's golden age, it felt like, "Yeah, this is us. This is the whole of us." To me personally, these are some of the most meaningful words ever recorded:
Elvis was a hero to mostNow they are also erroneous words (the evidence of Elvis straight up racism is thin) but that only makes the point. These were the things--rumors, warts and all--that were said when it was only us around, and we were tired of whispering them. When Chuck said that it was like an exorcism. It was a statement about an almost parallel reality ("Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps") that had gone unacknowledged. I can't speak for black youth everywhere, but in my set, by 92, you were embarrassed to say "sexy young ladies of the light-skin breed" or "redbone booties I'm out to wax." You couldn't really rock the S-Curl anymore--at least not out east. And you'd be publicly mocked for throwing in green contacts.
But he never meant ---- to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother---- him and John Wayne
Cause I'm Black and I'm proud
I'm ready and hyped plus I'm amped
Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps
I'm thankful for that. And yet, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time these past few months, thinking about what my own anger caused me to miss. Likely because the pain of those years is so removed, I can look at the video for When Doves Cry, not just without angst, but with a sense that that really was the future, that Prince for all his faux biracialism, was on to something. The '80s were so segregated, and when we saw Mike with this diverse group in the Smooth Criminal video, we didn't think he was bringing the real. But he was bringing the future.
I think now, that all of us, from that period, walked with some shame about how we looked--our kinky hair, full lips, differing shade of brown. But I think it was wrong of me, and those like me, to write off what these guys were doing strictly as shame, and wronger still, I think, to not see the visionary aspects that were there too. Shame was there, but there was also so much more.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I'd grown used to the idea that rap was MC Hammer and Kris Kross, so when I first heard Fight the Power, it was like being hit in the head with a brick. I was stunned by how angry it was, and, the more I thought about it, by how cool it was. I was listening to a lot of punk and ska at the time, and I felt at home with Public Enemy and their anger, even if it wasn't my anger.
I hear that man. Headbangers for Ice Cube and P.E.
Seconded!
Yep, another one here (though I was mostly metal then; didn't get really into punk till later).
A big part of it for me was PE and NWAs seriousness; the coherence of their personae.
Kriss Kross were, besides being a really poor joke, much later. Fight the Power was 1989, Straight Outta Compton 1988, Totally Krossed Out wasn't until 1992.
Don't knock the legacy of bondage, servitude, miscegenation and race on Mars. They don't call it the Red Planet for nothing.
Can I just say that I love the comments on this blog? TNC's "Martian" was awesome, and this makes it awesomer.
you were embarrassed to say "sexy young ladies of the light-skin breed" or "redbone booties I'm out to wax.
Not to mention the fact the Dizzy Gillespie didn't play the sax.
That line always bothered me too. Although it didn't stop me from dancing my ass of to Funky For You
Yeah, I listened to that album so much I started thinking Gillespie actually did play the sax.
Also, I can't be the only one that thought Greg Nice looked like a snowman.
"these guys were taking our music, but not taking us. " This is an elegant statement of the problem that I think went unacknowledged in most of Sullivan's posts last week about how black white Americans are (for example: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/10/whose-country-ctd-1.html). Similar to the comment in The Beautiful Struggle about white frat boys had appropriated Bob Marley.
Like most of your posts, I'll have to re-read this a few times to absorb it (and undersand it).
But, for now, I will co-sign on the hotness of Vanity. Whew! In her heyday, she was so phine that I would have gladly "drank her dirty bath water." For real.
Few things. 1) That Seventh Heaven dance number, the "Dirty Books" number and the terribly lipsynced Hot Saki Sue scenes are my emotional chicken soup.
2) When you talk about music of that period, I think a lot of people forget (with the exception of MJ) how incredibly segregated the music industry was. Between '82 and '90, the Billboard R&B chart was called the Hot Black Singles. Prince was very aware of this and was cautious not to be so pigeonholed. The reason he signed with WB instead of CBS (who I think found him first) was that CBS wanted Verdeen White of Earth, Wind, and Fire to produce his first album and he did not want to be a marginal act. I think the reason we saw more of the lighter folks was because the were marketed for more of the crossover hits. So I think it goes back to how the record company chose to market the artists, Grace Jones and the Pointer Sisters certainly weren't red bones.
Thanks. Good points.
Great point, Janine. In fact, Prince created The Time as a vehicle to perform his explicitly "black" material. He wrote, arranged, and played all of The Time albums. There are unreleased outtakes of The Time in the studio, and at times you can clearly hear Prince directing Morris Day ("No Morris, sing it like THIS) and then Morris performs it verbatim.
I dunno, I don't think "light skin" or faux bi racailism ever went out of style, particularly for black women. Light skin gives folks more opportunities to cross over, to be black but not just black. That creates not only an aesthetic hierarchy, but a hierarchy of opportunity, that I think clearly persists in entertainment and media to this day. We have some famous, talented black women these days who are universally acknowledged as beautiful - but who are they? Halle Berry, Beyonce, Tyra, the half dozen singing **ahna's who I can't keep straight.
Not to say that these aren't talented "redbones" or that Prince's distressing racial fantasy of near-whiteness somehow expunges his genius. That's not the case, but the shame is definitely there all wrapped up in the package. It cannot be separated out. And if, during one's growing years as a black person who will never be in the cross over category, you chose to seek out the images of people who look like you and the art they have created, rather than longing for an aesthetic and "exoticism" that is largely manufactured do to a need to disavow blackness, well, I think that's probably okay. Healthy even.
I don't really disagree, but I think it's a matter of degree. Whitney Houston was in The Bodyguard. Gabrielle Union is out there. Lauryn Hill had it before she lost it. I'm not so much saying it's gone, I just don't think it's what it was.
Lauryn Hill was never going to become a huge crossover success, largely because of that dumb rumor that was started on Howard Stern's show.
Lauryn Hill had already achieved crossover success. I don't know what else you call two multiplatinum albums--one solo, one in a group, and an armful of grammys.
Seconded, TNC. I was 16 when Miseducation came out and that was one of a few albums in the whole decade that EVERYONE I knew (read: teenage, middle class white girls) went out and bought. Girls that listened to Britney and girls that listened to Pearl Jam - we all bought it. For most of us, it was probably the first R&B/hip hop record we'd ever touched. I can't think of a better example of crossover success from that era, on the female side of things anyhow.
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.
deva, definitely correct there. There's a lot of currency in being a light-skinned sister and it is especially valuable in entertainment.
Love to Alicia Keys too.
I think the complexion matters most on the margins. Whitney Houston had huge advantages coming in, but if Whitney had been darker...? I would suspect that it is easier for a light-skinned woman to get to the next level. Once you have impact, the skin matters less. But the complexion can matter on whether or not you can break through.
I love Alicia Keys to.
Alicia and India Aire came out at the same time. Both are super talented, lovey woman. But, in terms of skin color, Alicia is the red bone and India is dark-skinned.
Some have argued that this difference in skin tone has negatively impacted India's career. When compared to Alicia, India has not yet achieved her level of success. (Both were nominated for several Grammy's their first year out. Alicia won several and India went home empty-handed.)
Not sure myself, if skin color can be blamed solely for their differing levels of success. Alicia's music has more of a pop (cross-over) appeal, while India's music (spiritual/neo-soul) has more a niche appeal.
I personally think that skin tone has played a role in the lack of success of India.Arie. Heck, she even alludes to it in her songs.
It really is a shame because I find India's message in her music the type of stuff people need to hear more of.
I remember that year. Both Alicia and India were nominated for the same 5 awards. Alicia beat out India everytime. I couldn't understand it. Alicia's music was aaaight, but nothing fantastic. All she had on that CD was "Fallin'" and if you ask me, that song was overrated. India's music had so more more depth and character, and musically was just better.
I remember India had just performed, and was standing back stage at the Grammys as they announced the last award that she and Alicia were nominated for. She looked so dejected when she lost, and I was totally with her. You could just tell she was thinking. "Ya'll can give me just one, can't you?"
To be fair to Alicia, I think she is a product of the Clive Davis machine. She was promoted so heavily, you couldn't get away from her if you tried. Unfortunately, these things tend to matter at awards shows. But it since has always bugged me, why couldn's she win just one award? She deserved it.
I remember that year as well. I wore out both albums and was stunned that India did not get one grammy, it was criminal. I thought then and think now that skin was a factor.
Tough to say, but I think it's particularly difficult to judge the impact of race in industry awards because of the many political factors in play. While India's work was (in my humble opinion) undeniably better, the Grammy's often don't track quality at all. Britney Spears won one, for g-d's sake.
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.
Not only this, but the preference for "redbones" and "lightskint" are still being voiced in TODAY's rap songs (Thanks, Lil' Wayne, and Kanye). Colorism is still a conversation that most people are reluctant to have.
Mmmhmm.
You can put Ne-yo in that group. I stopped listening him because of his "all the prettiest kids are light-skinned," comment.
Wow. I am speechless.
This is the eptimome of self-hatred.
I will never be able to see him or listen to his music again without remembering his ignorance.
Ugh. I hate the light skinned v. dark skinned thing. One of my girlfriends made some comment about being light skinned and I looked at her like she was insane - we're the same complexion! And I am definitely brown skinned. Like really? You wanna be light skinned that bad? It was so disappointing. Everyone has their personal preference and has a right to. Having said that, there is a distinction between having a "type" and disdain for anyone outside of that type. I nearly came to blows with a relative who said he wouldn't marry a "darkie."
And Ne-Yo needs his ass whooped. Ditto to what Storm said.
That's so fucking sad. What are the quotes? I'm not doubting you, I just want to know what they said...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j98fPBHpTBk
It's towards the end. IIRC he claimed that folks who were blasting him about it were just bitter.
I don't understand why it's such a big deal for a black person to think a light-skinned, mixed-race look is more beautiful than a dark-skinned look. Is it just the history, or do you think there's actually something wrong with having that aesthetic preference?
@R.Dave, since the comments have nested...
If it was truly just an aesthetic preference that couldn't be traced back to years of conditioning society to find a certain aesthetic beautiful and preferable, then I would agree with you.
But, from my own experience, having had more than one black man that I've dated tell me that:
They would assume, sight unseen, that any black woman with light skin and long hair would be cute.
I'm the darkest woman they've ever dated and I should be proud of that.
They like me "even though" I'm dark.
That strikes me as a bit more than just aesthetic preference, although every time I bring this up to the men who had said this to me they argue me down vehemently.
@ candace.
I was not going to respond but this is so very true and so very sad. It is all about history.
I am what is considered brown skinned and I have dated guys--although temporarily who said that their mothers would like me because I am not too dark. It's all about history and this warped mentality that black folks just cannot shake off unfortunately.
@jamilah, candace and R.Dave:
You guys touched on something that nags at me from time to time, especially when this subject is brought up. Given all the history, how is anyone to know what they like because they like vs. because they were conditioned to? It's pretty galling.
The idea that someone could dissect my preferences and be like oh you like girl a because she's white, girl b because she's a certain kind of black and girl c because, etc. and have there be a possibility that they're not completely full of shit is pretty frustrating to think about.
Preference is supposed to be about I like her because when she walked in the room I couldn't stop looking at her and things like that...
With all this history, how am I supposed to know if I'm responding to conditioning (either by following where it leads or by consciously doing a 180) or just going after women that I find attractive.
Weezy's opening lyrics in this summer's smash hit, "Every Girl":
"Uh/I like a long haired thick red bone/Open up her legs then filet mignon that p---y"
...dude seems to be living out his fantasy, considering he got three of 'em knocked up around the same time.
I can't find the song in which Kanye mentions his preference, but here's a quote from an Essence interview in Dec. '06:
“If it wasn’t for race mixing there’d be no video girls. Me and most of our friends like mutts a lot. Yeah, in the hood they call ‘em mutts.”
@candace
Ah, yes. The "cute for a darkskinned girl" song. I know it well. Thankfully, I haven't encountered it that much since college. But I still hear the stories from my girls out in the trenches.
@AMT - I'm definitely not saying that people aren't allowed to like who they like for any number of reasons, or that they should feel. My best friend almost exclusively dates light skinned black men and has said time and again that it is her preference (plus, they just seem to find her, which amuses the heck outta me). Some of that is probably conditioning, and a lot of that is just what she likes. It makes for some funny jokes, but I generally leave her alone about it.
I think that growing up as a brown skinned woman I'm also just really sensitive to the color issue, having had it thrown in my face time and again by the men I date, their mothers (particularily the one who didn't want me to meet his mom because he thought I was *too* dark for her liking), the music I listen to, and a lot of the tv and movies that I watch.
Also, I'll say again, someone actually said to me verbatim that they would assume that any light skinned girl with long hair would be attractive, sight unseen. That's a bold statement to make when you are just talking about personal preference. I like tall men, but I'm not going to assume that every tall man I've never met is cute.
I don't think you should spend much time thinking about it, actually. There's a difference between noting a particular history of attacking the beauty of dark-skin women, and someone asserting that you--an individual--are only dating certain women because they aren't dark-skin. The first strikes me as a fact. The second strikes me as really presumptuous.
On this whole subject, it's worth looking at the other side. In other words, don't simply ask "How does this make dark-skin girls feel?" Ask "How does this make light-skin girls feel?"
I don't know--within the spectrum of black woemn, I've dated all over the map. I think it's safe to say that "Your pretty for a dark-skin girl" is a really bad line. But I think it's also safe to say that telling a light-skin girl "I really like red-bones" is almost just as bad as an idea.
It's worth looking at a quote like this:
I could be wrong, but I just don't think that most biracial black women would think that that's a compliment. Were I single, it certainly wouldn't be how I went about dating.
@TNC
You're not wrong. Many lighter-skinned women are fed up with the fetishizing. It definitely cuts both ways.
The blowback Ye received from that interview was ginormous. But as far as as I know he never retracted the comment, nor did he apologize.
"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.
Another thing we need to consider in retrospect is that black entertainers were still largely subject to unspoken the "one-drop" rule, which forced icons like Prince and Michael to become... icons. The dancing had to better, the videos and lyrics had to be more sexual, they had to create an identity that transcended race to become commercially dominant.
A great example of a band that never quite crossed over (in the same way as Prince) was Living Colour. If LC had been a white band coming into the end of the 80s and going into the 90s, they would have dominated the scene. Faith No More ranks higher than LC (VH1 ranking, I know). Living Colour and, to a much more limited degree, Bodycount were my rock when I wasn't listening to PE or Paris.
I don't know. Living Colour did pretty well for themselves before Muzz Skillings left (or got fired?) and the band began to fall apart and pursue solo projects. Their third full-length album wasn't very good, and after that the genre pretty much fell from favor with the masses as grunge, alt-rock, and hip-hip took over. I think LC crossed over just fine, but they just didn't last that long. If Faith No More is ranked higher than LC in any regard, whoever's doing the ranking is an idiot.
Incidentally, a friend saw LC play in L.A. a 5-6 years ago and said it was great.
Hey now. The individual members of Living Colour might have been more musically talented than FNM, but they were both good bands. Angel Dust was a great album. Also, music rankings get the gas face. Lists in general are the fat free mayonnaise of publishing/TV. I look forward to Vh1's top 100 lists of all time (maybe called "I Love Lists").
I saw a reunited Living Color in Chicago 3 weeks ago. They haven't missed a beat. I also try to catch the Yohimbe Bros whenever they're in town. I'll travel to see these bands...
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.
Me, I worship Jennifer Hudson. Who is celebrated for her beauty as well as for her talent -- but I don't expect the industry to scour the cities for lookalikes.
That this discussion hasn't grown obsolete **four decades** after "Black is Beautiful" depresses me. I'm a middle-aged white man. (Who never "appropriated" Bob Marley or pretended I was almost black.)
I don't know exactly how this relates to this whole discussion but when I look at Vanity's picture I'm struck how differently I think about it now as compared to then in terms of race. I know she's a light-skinned black woman because I know who Vanity is. But if you showed my this picture today without my knowing who it was my first instinct would be to wonder if she were a Lantina. I guess things are getting more complex. Again, I can't say how this adds to this conversation (if at all)- but it does seem to be worth noting.
I agree. I never really thought of Vanity as black when I first saw the Last Dragon. She was just the hot girl in the movie. And I don't know anything about Vanity except that she was hot and was asked by Bruce Leroy to "show me some moves". And when I saw the picture today I was like, she looks like she could be Puerto Rican or a host of other ethnicities and/or combinations of them.
At some point in the future people will not be able to make these calls (dark-skinned white or light-skinned black) because it'll just be too hard to tell. I look forward to that day.
Absolutely. One day, kids in the future will disbelievingly read of the days when human skin came in only one color (brown) and people treated the particular shade of brown (lighter brown being called "white," and darker brown being called "black," for example) as being something important.
Sometimes I think that our entire species is kind of ridiculous.
I don't know if it'll come to that, but we could very well be shifting towards being more like Brazil where racial lines seem to be a little more blurred. I'm not saying I haven't read or heard(I've never been, just new some from living in NYC) anything about racial tension there, but it doesn't seem like the ol' U.S. of A.
Of course, this is also the sort of thing that seems to scare the crap outta the Glen Becks of our country, but that's another thread.
I was more referring to the time when skin color becomes a fashion choice. I don't think it's more than a few generations off. And I can only imagine how silly we'll look.
(Though I'm sure that'll be far from the only thing that makes us look silly to future students of history. I mean, a lot of us don't believe in evolution.)
i don't know about that, people have been mixing on earth since the beginning of humanity, and the societies have no trouble devising rules for sorting out who's who.
i also do not look forward to a "beige" future, because breeding away dark skinned folk is not the same as getting over racial prejudice.
I have been told that in puerto rican families -- members can range from looking black to looking white, between generations and even between siblings.
i feel sorry for the dark skinned child who would inevitably be born into this "beige vision" of the future -- in that "post racial world" he would still be stigmatized because of his skin color.
i don't know about that, people have been mixing on earth since the beginning of humanity, and the societies have no trouble devising rules for sorting out who's who.
That is not how it happened.
For centuries, as waves of migration carried humanity (kinky-haired, dark skinned) out of Africa and beyond, populations became isolated and those populations evolved according to selective pressures of those diverse environments. The population that remained in Africa remained dark-skinned. The population that settled in Europe became lighter. The population that settled East Asia became "Asian." The population that voyaged out to the furthest reaches of the Pacific became Polynesians. The Asians who migrated across the Bering Strait became the natives of the Americas. And so on and so forth. It is precisely because these populations did NOT mix much, if at all, for millennia that we have these discernible "races" of people today.
This is not to say that people can't come up with other classification schemes for one another, but once we all look more similar it'll be awfully hard to look at each other and make the kinds of stupid conclusions we've been making in recent centuries.
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)
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.
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.
Cocomala,
I replied to your previous comment at the end of the main thread.
I saw something on TV (probably VH1) about where Vanity (Denise Matthews) is now. She turned into a bible-thumping Jesus freak. Pretty sad.
I sure hope those mean "religous kook" atheists leave her alone!
I'm almost certain I'm not going to be able to articulate what I want to say here, but I'll give it a try.
This was a really interesting post (so far, so good!) and a little heart-breaking, too.
Hmmm. I just erased all of the next paragraph I wrote, because I was so certain it was going to come out wrong.
Here's part of what I want to try to say: it's interesting to hear of you separating out light-skin, multi-racial African-Americans as having offended back in the 1980s. I wouldn't have thought differently about Lionel Richie or Whitney and, say, Ice Cube or even James Brown. They all did music, some of which I liked more than others, and they were all African-American--identified themselves as African-Americans--and I didn't really give it much more thought.
Which may come off as holier-than-thou, but which is just as clearly connected to the ignorance and hatred that underlay the one-drop rule. I thought of them as African-American both because they identified as African-American and because society defined them as African-American. And because I was white, and not well aware of the skin-tone wars, it never occurred to me to think of Denzel Washington as being or looking different than Wesley Snipes on any other level than that people look different from one another.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that sanctimony and racism come out sounding kinda similar on this topic. Which is a little uncomfortable.
School Daze came out in 1988.
I'm not sure what point you're making, because I never saw the film. But I was just speaking for myself, not for anyone else, and certainly not for Spike Lee.
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.
Yeah, sorry, I'm still not seeing the connection to what I said. Help me out?
I hear you. I'ma keep reading these comments and see if anyone else works in this direction.
i remember when biggie broke and all the thick, dark-skinned dudes felt the palpable shift from the girls loving the al b sures to liking dark-skinned brus with a bit of grit to them. that's how it felt in dc, anyway...
I though Biggie-sized dudes was a Winter thing only. There's no way I'm sharing a bed with a 300 lb dude during a 90 degree, 70% humidity night in DC.
nah....Biggie didn't do it. It was the one-two punch of Denzel and Mike Jordan in the late 80's that brought dark skinned, non-wavey haired dudes in style with the ladies. And I thank these men to this day!
Unfortunately, the reps from lightskinned nation at the time were all kinds of soft (Prince, El Debarge, Al B)---they just couldn't match the more rugged masculinity of Denzel, MJ or even Wesley Snipes. Plus the 80's were a time of Rambo where macho was back in vogue. Perhaps if the more rugged lighter brothas from a generation before like Malcolm or Huey were around it would have been different.
As for big men, Gerald Levertt had girls fiending for husky love around that time as well. To be honest, I don't know any regla women who were jocking Biggie for his looks or sex appeal--his perceived paper? maybe. But looks, nah.
This post is great. Touching, insightful, and allows us some insight into your head.
"I think so many of us grew up in neighborhoods where there wasn't that sort of diversity and we believed that the pulsing heart of American music was there on the block, and anything that didn't pledge fealty to the block, wasn't "real" music."
The above makes me think about authenticity. When I was growing up in the suburbs, we thought we knew what was authentically black. Seems so ridiculous now. I remember when I arrived at college and one of my new roommates was talking about a friend of his and he said, "That's the whitest black guy you'll ever meet." Knowing what I know now, it's immediately apparent how wrong that type of judgement is. But thinking about what's really black and what's not was natural to me then.
And it was informed greatly by media, including music. There's some type of odd parallel between how I saw authentic music back then and how TNC did. My opinion was informed by what I thought I knew about blackness, TNC's by his actual life experience. I'd say mine was a little racist. But both were limiting, in retrospect.
I think it is a testament to my overwhelming Caucasian-ness that I've never heard the word "redbone" used to mean biracial before in my life. There was a bbq joint in Davis Square in Somerville, MA called Redbones, but I assumed it had to do with the cuisine.
Can anyone enlighten me as to the origins of that phrase? I realize I could Google, but the answers here are usually better.
I went to Redbone's a few times myself. I generally don't bother trying to find good bar-b-que outside of Philly, though (same for cheesetaks and hoagies).
As for the term, the idea comes from lightskinned folks being associated with the color red (similar to the historic associataion of that color with Native Americans.) In the Black community "black" actually used to refer specifically to dark-skinned people, "brown" to people who's color was in the middle, and "red", "yellow", "saffron", "beige" to people who were light. It's interesting that outside groups are generally unaware of these distinctions adn frequently claim these colors for themselves.
What keeps striking me about it is that it's redbone. It feels like it's equating skin color with something, well, deeper than skin. Does anyone who, unlike me, has heard this term before today feel this way?
Redbone does not mean bi-racial. It just means a black person with undertones of a reddish hue to their skin. Both my grandparents were black and my mother and her sisters definitely fit into the redbone category.
For the record, yeah, I'm white and never heard the term "redbone" used for light-skinned blacks before.
My first reaction to reading this post was: "Wow, cool."
I say this because it brings such a different perspective to almost everything that I've experienced.
As a rather privileged (upper middle class, white, blonde-hair green eyed, male) individual growing up in the Northwest corner of Evanston, IL, in the 1980's, my perspective on things like diversity or people like Prince or Vanity obviously comes from a very different place. It is true that Evanston was technically "diverse" in the sense that 40% of its population was black, and that was how I then grew up assuming the rest of America was, but in terms of actual housing and neighborhoods, it was still quite segregated--there was a definite "98% white" area up north and along the lake, a "90%" black area in the middle by the high school, and then a more or less mixed/integrated area as you headed south towards the Chicago border.
Anyway, although I grew up with casual exposure to blacks, I never actually had any close black friends. I figure this result was most likely due to multiple reasons: a) The basic effects of this segregated housing environment so that I didn't have any black neighbors (although the next-door neighbors were a mixed-race couple and I was friends with their kids ) b) but also big cultural differences that kept me from really having anything in common with most of the blacks I grew up with.
Specifically, at the time I was (and pretty much still am today) much more into goth/industrial music, science fiction, and Dungeons & Dragons than the average kid--none of which, I know, are exclusively white oriented, but which seemed in my environment to be even more "white" than the basic Evanstonian culture that surrounded me. Thus, I rarely had the opportunity in everyday life to build strong friendships across any racial/cultural divide at the time, and being a rather shy and insecure kid anyway, I didn't do anything to change this.. to my detriment..
The result of all this exposition is merely to set up the context for my next statement that I really appreciate getting a glimpse into a totally different world presented by TNC--even if I fully understand all of the caveats that this is just one man's experience.
In any case, now that I live in Wisconsin, I can state that I often have an easier time chatting with the blacks I meet on the bus--most of whom have moved here from Chicago--then I do with many of the white rural Wisconsinites who have moved to Madison. This doesn't mean that much, I know, in the greater scheme of things, but I just wanted to put some thoughts down here..
Thanks for everything, TNC..
It I was just having a similar conversation about the 80's, music, and race the other day. I had mentioned to a co-worker that my roommate, a black woman in her early 30's, loves Duran Duran. This co-worker, a white man in his 40's, remarked that he would have never guessed my roommate liked Duran Duran--yet he has often acknowledged how much he loved Public Enemy during that time. At that point we were both reminded how segregated music used to be and how we readily it's assumed someone who grew up in that era liked a certain kind of music based on their race, with the exception of Prince, MJ and perhaps Lionel Richie or Whitney Houston.
I grew up in the suburbs where I was one of few black kids. I didn't even know black radio stations existed, as none of my peers listened and my parents were still clinging to Motown and shunned most popular music. So, perhaps coming from the perspective of being from a biracial family that thoroughly embraced the "one drop rule"--meaning no matter how light the skin, eyes or how straight the hair NO ONE in my family identifies as anything other than black-- I noticed the whole skin color heirarchy of the time, but in my limited world view I automatically viewed those people (Vanity, Prince, Debarge) as black, no matter what they told Ebony or Jet, because I identified with them despite perhaps being a shade or two darker. I was just glad to see black people somewhere, no matter the shade or texture the hair. We were still few and far between in media, even in entertainment.
I am now one of those people who has trouble with the "new racial identification" even though I try to respect it. Alicia Keys, Jordan Sparks, Beyonce, Rihanna, Halle Berry, Soledad O Brien,Vanessa Williams,Shemar Moore, even Vin Diesel-- I never saw any of those folks as anything other than black and don't ask me HOW I differentiated them from Latinos. I don't know,other than being a Texan surrounded by Hispanics who didn' look like any of those people to me.
Was it necessarily shame, though? Obviously we can't get into the head of everyone who ever made bank on their multi-racial appearance, but I'd be surprised if it was really about "looking white" for everyone. Maybe people just liked the look for its own sake and were self-confident enough to pursue it despite the disdain and peer pressure from certain segments of the black community. Maybe it was strength not shame that drove at least some of them to look how they wanted to look and be how they wanted to be.
The above statement made me think of Mariah Carey's strategy when she first came on the music scene.
Mariah Carey, under the management of Tommy Motola, made a definitive decision to present herself as "white" or as racially ambigious as possible, to improve her chances of cross-over mainstream success.
What I find most ironic about this, is that when Mariah left Tommy, she seemed to embrace her blackness (at least from a musical standpoint) by incorporating r&b/hip hop and hip hop artists into your songs. Suddenly, Mariah become more "down" and urban (read: black).
YES!! It was very bizarre. When she was doing the "mainstream" vis-a-vis "white" schtick, she was virginal and pure, covered from head to toe. But then when she left Matolla, she became more "urban" - and lost all of her damn clothes. I'm still trying to figure out if she perceives a scantilly clad wardrobe to be a "black" thing, or if she just enjoys walking around half naked in stilletos. I think she just likes showing off her body, she got a mean shoe game though...
On this front-I think if Cassie was working with someone other than Diddy she would be way bigger right now. Also, for a little SAT work here Alicia Keys:Clive Davis as Leona Lewis:Simon Coweel.
Cowell!
LOL. True. Diddy is the Career Killer, farreal.
As a white man whose favorite genre is beatles, zeppelin etc. it does really bother me the way white rock musicians appropriated black music without really bringing black people themselves into the mix. Only one classic rock band(to my knowledge) wrote a song about their debt to black bluesmen, and ironically it was the band flying the confederate flag:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfCGToH09r4
There's something pretty refreshing about a band most write off as ignorant rednecks admitting that black people played the blues better than anyone else.
Somewhat ironically U2 has done a good job acknowledging their black american influences (I say this because I don't really see them in their earlier albums). Check out "I Still havent found what im looking for" off of Rattle and Hum, or hell, a lot of Rattle and Hum
You might be interested in a book called, "Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music." You might be interested to learn that to some degree, divisions between country, folk, and blues are constructs of the music industry and the ideologies of field recorders like the Lomaxes. He makes a compelling argument that broke, rural Black and White people often played the exact same songs, but the city folk who would record them for commercial records or WPA reasons tended to categorize based on their own assumptions about genre and race.
janinedm~
There is also a Bluegrass doc (the name escapes me) that supports that argument.
They showed Appalachian Irish/Scots-Irish music influenced by Black rhythms. There was an old black man dancing a jig to the jug, washboard combo.
On the blues, comics, history, and academia:
http://www.comixology.com/articles/314/You-ve-Got-to-Suffer-If-You-Wanna-Sing-the-Blues
Its too bad there's a hierarchy based on skin tone, because I think dark skin is very pretty - on men and women.
maybe worth saying that skin-tone is only one issue in perceptions of whether people look black or white or biracial?
i mean--facial bones have a lot to do with it, right? you can have two people with the same skin-color, with different bones, and one will be perceived as african, the other perceived as south indian or hispanic or mediterranean. you mentioned fullness of lips--sure, and the shape of noses and the structure of cheekbones and all sorts of things.
and you mentioned hair texture and eye-color, which are also read as racial one way or another, independently of skin-color.
i guess i'm just saying--there's a lot of issues bundled up in it, more than literal skin-tone. though maybe "light-skin" is just a way of referring to all of those many factors in short-hand, which is okay.
otherwise--interesting reflections (as always) on those earlier images of "faux biracialism" as showing us a glimpse of the future. check out the videos of sly and the family stone--seeing those bands with blacks and whites, men and women playing together back in '71 must have *really* shocked people into seeing the future. musta shocked the glen becks of the day into strokes. worth seeing for the futurology.
(as well as the fact that larry graham lays down some of the funkiest basss lines in history--it just doesn't get better than "thankyoufallettinme".)
Thank you for pointing that out. It's pretty crucial.
There are two questions that interest me about this, speaking as a woman but not a black woman. The first is whether a dark-skinned black woman can achieve superstar-dom by following the sexy diva model. That's a tricky question, and a lot of people have addressed it above.
But the bigger question for me is whether women of any color can be successful performers without embracing the sexy diva model at all. There do seem to be some out there who can manage it on pure musicianship and hard work. I'm thinking of Tracy Chapman as a good example. Dark, with dreadlocks (sometimes), attractive but not trading on beauty in any obvious way... and who seems to successful everywhere, including a whiter-than-white bar I once visited in the Australian outback.
There will always be people who trade in large part on their looks in the entertainment industry, and of course it's good if people of all skin colors have equal chances to do so. But it's also important to give full credit to people (especially women) who just plain make good art.
Hey TNC. Just a note to say that I'm your age, and this was not the future for me. It was present reality of diversity... just way more dope, sexy, and magical. I grew up in inner-city Milwaukee--a place often mentioned (along with Baltimore, actually) as one of the most segregated cities in the US. However, my neighborhood of Merrill Park was a crossroads of the city including a real mix of Native American, Latino, African American, Vietnamese, Hmong, Irish, German, Jewish, Italian, and Polish kids (and yes, these subdivisions of whiteness were still real categories in Brewtown ca. 1985).
When I learned to pop and lock, do the Mustang, the Worm, the Backspin and the Moonwalk, it was alongside neighborhood kids from all these groups -- and notably, combinations thereof. Me, Bull, Rodney, Vengxai, and the Fonz brothers (yes, seriously) set up the cardboard, dropped in our dubbed Newcleus tape and rocked our japanese bandanas on the shin. When I think back on it, I can't help but worry that we've actually retrenched racial difference. In other words, I don't know that that wasn't the future and we're now in the past. In fact, those films capture something of a futuristic ethos that I don't think we have anymore.
I'll keep thinking on this but I'd refer folks back up to Karen, who I tend to agree with on this issue. In the meantime, it seems important when doing this kind of recalling to think about whether we're remembering or, in fact, reimagining the past.
It's worth noting, with due respect, that I never really claimed to be speaking for you:
Your narrative is just as valid as mine--but there is no one, singular narrative. Hence:
The past is, by its very nature, always reimagined. There is no official What It Felt Like To Be Black In The 80s For All Black People Everywhere book. Thank God. This is one kid talking--nothing more. We all have our narratives. We all have our pasts.
Fair enough. But, let me ask a follow up then... when you say: "when we saw Mike with this diverse group in the Smooth Criminal video, we didn't think he was bringing the real. But he was bringing the future..." you're talking about one vision of future, correct?
I wouldn't really think of that way, no. I was referring to a world where folks weren't as bound by race. But that doesn't mean a world where everyone is unbound. You shouldn't read this like a math problem. It's not sociology. It's memory.
Karen's post confused me. If there was no such issue then, why does the movie School Daze even exist? Is the news that Black people can be racist towards black people and that when we are, it sounds racist? Help me.
Your crew sounds nice. The kids in my neighborhood called me "Imitation of Life" in the 80s (look it up).
I was only speaking for myself, not for society. I said I wasn't aware of the issue in my own thinking.
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.
Excellent post, TNC. Enough to finally draw me out of lurker mode after a year of daily reading (you, Sully, Dreher, and J. Cole), despite being right in the wheelhouse for your readership: 40ish white man from north Jersey now living in Santa Fe, married for almost 20 years to a black woman from Newark and raising three sons, a D&D geek as a kid who's finally taken up WOW.
Anyway, just want to offer up an interesting counter anecdote, during the 80's my wife (the darkest and thus often most ridiculed kid in the family, who long ago clued me in on the whole "yellow" thing) misspent her time feverishly devoted to the Goth scene and dancing all night to stuff like Depeche Mode and 9 Inch Nails. She's never been able to get past her dislike of hip hop, and of a lot of "black music", in part because of what her mom instilled in her: a distrust of the anti-achievement and misogynistic layers within it. No surprise, I suppose, that her favorite black artist was and is Grace Jones!
And of course our "biracial" (c'mon, I've got a little Indian blood and my wife's got the standard black mix) children just don't quite get what we're even talking about when it comes to racial categories. Like someone said above, we're all different shades of brown to them. (Culture and history, that's a different story from race.)
Anyway, thanks for your post and your ongoing great work. All the best!
I've followed your blog via Google Reader for a couple months and this is the first time I can remember you mentioning that you had written a book. I just added it to my future reading list.
It drives me nuts when all someone does on their blog is pimp their book but you might be at the opposite extreme. You should mention it more often for newbys like me.
He does have a big notice about it and how to buy it on the sidebar...
The sidebar doesn't show up if you read the blog through a reader.
Ah. Point taken.
But it still goes to explain why he might not feel the need to flog the book much in his posts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
"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.
Huh. Back in Texas, Oklahoma, & Louisiana, light skin was often called "bright".
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.