The Study of Racialism

zandie · Suspended Joined: 19 Oct 2007 {Posts: 35 }

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/kane1025

Date: Thursday, October 25, 2007
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Ulysses “DJ Lish” Barnes must be the kind of brother who likes to go krump dancing through a minefield.

The minefield in this case is that age-old issue of shades of skin color among black folks. You know, that light-skinned black and dark-skinned black thing.

Oh yes, Barnes went there. And in a brazen and unwise way.

The story goes like this: Barnes is a DJ and party promoter who lives in Detroit. According to detnews.com, Barnes is a dark-skinned brother. He tried to promote a party with an admission fee at the Motor City’s Club APT. Then he tried to bill it as a “Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash." Then he tried to let the light-skinned sisters in for free.

The key word in all of the above is “tried.”

Dark-skinned sisters had a fit. Barnes heard from many of them. When he’d heard enough, he canceled the “Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash” and started copping more pleas than Michael Vick did in federal court.

“I made a mistake,” Barnes is quoted as saying in the detnews.com story. “I didn’t think there would be a backlash.

Uh-huh.

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” Barnes continued. “I had planned a party for other shades (of black women). We were going to take a shade of color each week. Next week was going to be a party for ‘Sexy Chocolate’ and the week after that for ‘Sexy Caramel.’”

The bottom line, Mr. DJ Lish, is that you wanted to do the light-skinned sisters first. Once again, the darker sisters got pushed to the back of the line. All Barnes did was ignite yet another hot intra-racial issue black folks have been trying to defuse for years.

And when the issue flares up, it can get nasty.

When I was in the Air Force and stationed at Bolling Air Force Base in southeast Washington, D.C., I visited a former college buddy who lived in northeast D.C. He had a basketball court in his driveway, and neighborhood kids would come by to shoot some hoops.

One of the kids was dark-skinned and another what black folks call, sometimes derisively, light, bright and damn near white. Both were about 14 years old.

The dark-skinned brother had the habit of calling the light-skinned brother “white boy” almost every chance he got. One day, the light-skinned brother got tired of it, and the fists flew. The dark-skinned brother actually got the better of the fisticuffs, but the light-skinned brother got a moral victory.

Never again did the dark-skinned brother call him “white boy.”

When the issue isn’t getting nasty, it can get downright comical. When I was in high school -- and we’re talking way back in the 1960s here -- I was in an Upward Bound program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There were about 40 boys in the program, most of them black.

The events white people called “riots” and black folks called “urban rebellions” had just begun. Newark, N.J., Detroit and Cambridge, Md., went up in flames during the first summer of the program.

One of the brothers in the program advocated rioting and proclaimed himself a strong advocate of black power. He preached the pro-black party line the whole summer. He had us taken in too, until one day he admitted he didn’t like dark-skinned black women.

He would only have light-skinned black women as girlfriends, he told us. He didn’t like dark-skinned black girls.

You know, it’s hard to take a black power advocate of that ilk seriously after that.

Forty years later, and this foolishness is still with us. And don’t think it’s just among black Americans. You need to check out how this dark-skinned black vs. light-skinned black plays out in places like Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and Brazil.

Black folks all through the diaspora remain as color-struck as ever. And the problem may afflict some white folks. Has anybody but me noticed that there were two, maybe three, dark-skinned models on the game show “Deal or No Deal” during the first season and how they vanished during the second season?

Hey, I like Claudia Jordan and Hayley Marie Norman and Tamika Jacobs and Alike Boggan as well as the next black man. But can’t a brother have a little variety and check out some dark-skinned sisters too?

Apparently not. Kind of makes you wonder if DJ Lish had a hand in axing dark-skinned black models from “Deal or No Deal,” doesn’t it?
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Blacks carry on skin tone bias
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/610818,CST-EDT-douglas19.article

Powell · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2379 }

Solution: Drop the whole nonsensical oxymoron. If the 14-year-old had said, "Yes, I AM white," the black boy would have been happy to call him "black" to put him down.

DChapman · Posted: Fri 26 Oct 2007 01:40 Post subject: Re: What is "light-skinned" anyway?

Famu · Mentor Joined: 27 Sep 2007 {Posts: 282 }

Monica · Mentor Joined: 02 Oct 2007 {Posts: 345 }

zandie · Suspended Joined: 19 Oct 2007 {Posts: 35 }

light skin black or light skin africans. people who are realy multiracial and not a lighter tone version of an africans. So this means we a darker skin black but with a lighter tone and white black featers.

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 661 }

William

Salsassin · SuperWizard Joined: 04 Apr 2005 {Posts: 3515 }