Corbin Fisher: Neil (II)

This race thing is ridiculous and people always tend to walk on eggshells around it. Being racist and not being attractive to certain people are two very different things.

I used have a fancy for black skin when I was a teenager, but I’m over it (for quite a while somehow). So am I racist now? Or litrally Hitler?

Does he know he was fucked by Austin?

stop it. now.

“You’re not Rashida Jones biracial, you’re Tracee Ellis Ross biracial — people think of you as black.”

It’s from the first ep. of ‘Dear White People’ on Netflix…it’s a hilarious statement and so true.

Austin is certainly more Tracee Ellis Ross, IMO.

I didn’t know that history until I went to college and one of my good girlfriends who is biracial discussed it with me. I guess it makes sense in the idea that societies idealization of white beauty is the norm and biracial people tend to have more white features. The fact that not only white people tend to find the “Halle Berry” look more attractive but also black people. Old off the book policies like the brown paper bag rule or the comb tests at HBCU’s and historically black fraternities and sororities…it’s all so complicated.

The brown paper bag test supposedly originated in New Orleans well after reconstruction–there weren’t really brown paper bags during slavery so I think you have some bad information there–it was a test used within the black community (usually in concentrated areas of more affluent educated areas like like NO, DC and NYC) to exclude darker black people. Howard University (the Harvard of HBCU’s at the time) was said to have unofficial admissions standards like this one.

It had to do with the idea of established norms of beauty, but also there was greater access in segregated America if you were lighter so it was a survival technique of lighter skinned families to only marry other light skinned people. The bag test was a way to keep people while in bars, social clubs like fraternities and sororities from dating outside of their “approved” skin color. Spike Lee talks a lot about this in his films like School Daze and Do The Right Thing. Also, watch The Inkwell, it’s another good portrayal of colorisim and its relation to classisim.

I also question how much murdering of biracial children happened–it certainly occurred–but slaves were the greatest currency in the world so people weren’t just killing them off for no reason. We also now see that the average African-American is 25-30% european–that didn’t stem from killing off all of those bi-racial babies, clearly the majority survived to establish the existing black race in America.

Shocking your mother grew up in the segregated south and missed much of this. You did see in a lot of areas that were self sustaining with a 100% black community (usually in the north, wealthier black enclaves like DC) that they were sometimes isolated from the horrors of Jim crow and the civil rights era. Churches and schools didn’t want to have their children terrorized so they didn’t discuss the issues in great detail and did not want them marching in the streets, TV was less prevalent so it was easy to do–very easy to do if you did not have to send your children into a store owned by white people who subjugated them, but to a store run by other black people.

It’s a fascinating, sad yet empowering segment of American history that is not taught well. The new African-American History Museum in Washington is amazing. You should put it on your list of things to see and do if you haven’t.

Wait….meaning no disrespect, but isn’t Clark Parker’s current girlfriend….Black? At least that’s what he posted over the last couple of days.