ON CAPICOSTIA: NO…SEXUALLY EXPLOITING BLACK AND BROWN WOMEN FOR WOKENESS IS NOT PROGRESS, BUT HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
by Edgar Miraculous Dyer
Jamaican American journalist, ANDREW RICKETTS, recently wrote an article, presently featured on MSN.com - HOW MANY DARK WOMEN SHOULD I DATE TO CURE MY COLORISM?
I have a BIG problem with the question posed in that title.
I will try to be sensitive in addressing my problem with the titular question. I will try to court clarity and eloquence in my exposition on it, ..but bear with me. A wide berth below will be appreciated, where you can intellectually afford it. Thank you in advance.
I am an unremarkably orangish-looking (but proud) American man of Afro-American, Mexican and Near Eastern ancestry - light-skinned, but not the lightest - and I have dated more than a few women of almost any color, you can think of. My maternal grandmother was a regal, brown-skinned, Afro-American woman, whose gentle beauty, just yesterday, was compared to a Disney princess's...by me. [Ha'ha.] Her daughter, my mother, was a brass-toned beauty, alternately compared to Halle Berry and Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis (two women, who look nothing alike), ..who grew up adoring the darker complexions of her mother and five, handsome brothers, ranging from light bronze to coffee brown. My father was a reddish bronze, Latino superman, who resembled Anthony Quinn, enough to be taken for his brother. So, I suppose you cannot and should not regard me as an unbiased, objective voice on being comfortable with people of varying complexions, darker or browner than my own.
That said, never in my fifty-plus years have I felt a sufficiently urgent need or license to USE dark or brown-skinned women, like aspirin or skin cream, ..to cure some latent, unconscious anxiety about feeling connected to them. Never known such an anxiety. Not even close.
Not over here.
I know that black women of every imaginable and recurring color have been sexually exploited, scientifically experimented on and generally USED enough, in the West and across the African Diaspora. They do not exist as penicillin or organic mushrooms ..to be taken to heal our infections ..or cleanse yourself with. For any man with the idea, the urgent longing, to 'use' our brown-skinned mothers and sisters to cure or change their minds about anything, I offer the following prescription: Stay the hell away from all black women, and go get your head examined.
If you love some brown-skinned women out there - if your admiration of them is not a fetish for your vanity, ..get after them. Get after 'her', ..if you find and fall in love with that extraordinary woman, who happens to be black as HEAVEN ..or brown as a fine TEA. Go get her and beg for the shadow of her favor. God go with you. But if you're all hot and bothered about medicating your color-obsessed, Westernized psyche in her dark, warm embrace - trying her, using her, popping her like designer pills...
Goodbye.
If you are light-skinned, and you find yourself attracted to people, who remind you of your light-skinned father or mother, that is not racist or colorist, ..and that is not what I'm talking about here. If you're sepia-toned ..and can't get that Eritrean guy, who reminds you of your brown-skinned grandpa, off your mind...don't. That's human. Yes, it's a color-oriented, personal preference, but it is also quite inescapably human. It's how some families, over time, ..get a LOOK. We've seen this. Look at the Kennedys, for crissakes! Again, that is not racism or complexionism at work, and please understand that is not what I'm decrying here.
I'm talking about the black, Latino, East Indian or mixed race man, who has deluded himself into thinking that sexually exploiting a dark-skinned woman for political reasons is progress ..or, worse, therapy. In his mind, the titular question, "How many dark women should I date...?", sounds charged with the noblest, most heroic intentions - dating justice, perhaps? To the rest of us guys, he's full of crap - some racist jerk (this one, a liberal), fishing for a socially acceptable excuse to satisfy an attraction to black and brown women, that he isn't comfortable with. To him, "Move along now, Woke Skywalker!"
May all that fake-wokeness be with you. Take it with you! Bye.
Go get your mind right, as our people say; that's what a psychologist is for. Black women of every hue have seen enough dehumanization in the last six centuries out of Africa, without you contributing more. Go get some help and leave black women alone. Bye.
At her best, whether she's indigo, brown, gold, almost white or whatever, she can claim a worthy man, a queen's grandson, as easily, as you'd pick a fruit from a tree. She doesn't need the 'help' of what you think your color-adjusted ideas about her can do, ..for her or for you. Goodbye.
'How many dark women should I date to cure my colorism?' That is the title of the MSN article, which follows...the question it asks black men and women, today. It's an absurd question, but I think the author, Andrew Ricketts, did a solidly good job of offering insight into a complex, sociopolitical issue. Be certain that's more consideration or respect than anybody gave Henrietta Lacks.
Read the article, anyway. You've come this far.
Then...find a smart, funny, pretty girl of any creed, costume or race, who makes you grateful to be alive, and make a complete fool of yourself over her. Quit obsessing over what fabulous color she is, papis - it's Valentine's Day.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Read Andrew Rickett's article, right here, on MSN.com
Edgar Miraculous (Mel) Dyer, Capicostia's publisher, without his fine, coyote-hatin' Goldiweiller, Kirby (now moved on to that big, coyote-hatin' hate group in the Sky) continues a somewhat bleaker, dogless existence in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC. He has been an active member of the Latino Culture Council of the Capitol Area (El Consejo de Cultura Latina – La Zona del Capitolio), the Kiwanis Club of Capitol Hill and the Board of Directors for both Total Care Services, Inc. and YMCA Capital View.
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