<p>^ Yeah. This is really the nasty underbelly of racism that blacks generally cannot bring themselves to face. Blacks who see other blacks like Dbate, often tend to become so livid, that they cannot evaluate themselves or the circumstances before them. On the other hand, blacks like Dbate are so desperate to run from socially defined “blackness” that any sort of a bitter response from blacks causes them to try to run faster. The fact is, however, no one can run from his skin.</p>
<p>I think this would be a fascinating place for blacks to begin in our attempt to heal ourselves. I do not think this is as complicated an issue as many try to make it. There are many black men who cannot see beauty in black women because they have been psychologically conditioned not to see it. But is there some sort of inherent aesthetic that makes whites prettier than blacks? I have thought about this for many years, and it was after several years of working with my kids and trying to manipulate my own aesthetic sense that I have become convinced that I know the answer. The answer is “absolutely not!” and it has been staring at us all the time. We have all seen how in some cultures there are physical features that are highly prized that were those features to exist in some other cultural context would be abominable. We have also experienced, most of us, people who initially turned us off physically, but who once we got to know them, became terribly attractive. We have tended to dismiss these respective responses as due to mere “cultural differences” and due to our falling in love with the person “inside” the person. But that is no explanation. I think, to make this shorter, what humans have done in these cases has been to take a set of unique pleasure experiences afford them by a person, and then transferred them to that person’s specific features so that the features become proxies for the experiences. When enough of this takes place between human populations, these features become generally attractive and the people literally cannot think differently, until something else comes along to change the aesthetic paradigm.</p>
<p>I think the phenomenon can and does happen in reverse. A woman may see “THE” man of her dreams. But upon getting to know him may begin to detest the very features that once attracted her. Even the masculine chin that she once loved, now makes the man look like a joke. Were everyone she met to give her the same intensely negative experiences, the very sight of those features would cause her revulsion.</p>
<p>I think this has happened to black folk, and that this is why some black folk wish to run from black folk. I think whites have done this to us by crafting for us our slave culture, which by definition was inferior to theirs. But I also think we have done this to ourselves by continuing much of this slave culture today. Some of the negative imagery and products of the culture have been transferred to our appearances over centuries so that in merely seeing us, many people today receive that negative imagery. Moreover, I think we continue to increase the problem by a wide variety of means, some of which we value deeply. No one likes a loser. Even those who understand the loser’s circumstances can only help but despise him. I think many blacks, rather than evaluate themselves here, simply run in the Ellisonian sense until later in life they discover that they have simply been running in circles.</p>
<p>It is a painful place to begin. But if we could calmly begin and hurt here for a bit, we would overcome and make our own decisions, for once, about who we are and what we ought to be. Poor Dbate here has, without knowing it, struggled all his life to be identified as white, despite that such a thing is futile. I think what he really wants is a blackness that is identified with power and authority, and not with so much failure. If we could give him this, culture and all, he would be very pleased to see beauty wherever it is, in Asians, Hispanics, in whites, and certainly in blacks. Currently, these sorts of blacks are like people who claim they do not like ballet. It is not that they do not like ballet. They are so ignorant of ballet that they cannot appreciate it. Ignorance is the mother of personal preference. When a black person cannot like black women, he indicates ignorance of those women, likely due in part to ignorance of himself.</p>
<p>I want to be sure to say here that I do not fault Dbate. It may make a lot of blacks angry, but I think there is a lot about black culture that should make a lot of blacks wants to run from it. I think it is just a mess. But, I also think it is pretty amazing, too amazing to just abandon as some blacks are wont to do. If we can deliberately retool it, and I think we should do so by deliberately inculcating some of the values of America’ Founding Fathers (as hard as that may be for some people to imagine), we could leave our kids with a cultural foundation that could revolutionize the whole world.</p>