Try these complexions on for size…

On the heels of my previous post about Karen Grigsby Bates, my moves here intend to be quick. But my writing way just can’t resist taking yet another detour into the ideas of “White Women Have The Healthiest And Wealthiest Black Men.” This actually leads into a bigger project for the kinté space involving the Blues of Son House—so the ‘detour’ is really not that far… My reason for approaching this subject by way of Son House is to show just how old this “interracial” issue is—and the cognitive model is not as simple as “we” would like to think. But based on reading and listening to people who “explore” this issue, the effort on both “sides” is to keep it stupid simple.

Try these complexions on for size:

• A mother with strong African features can indirectly ‘encourage’ her son to “chase white women” because the son continually hears her curse her physical appearance with pseudo-Biblical racial imagery throughout her entire life. This is the “Black Mama” of Son House, according to his Blues.
• An achieving person of strong African features can succumb to “jungle fever” by attrition, simply because they are ‘racially isolated.’ This happened to a female graduate student I had a crush on long ago at UCSB. She treated me like a kid since I was an undergrad and her white male colleagues broke her down—this is of her own admission in joking conversation.
• Someone should perform some kind of “groundbreaking” research involving two groups of “African American” males that already use pornography to help them imagine sexual activity. One group of males use pornography with people of strong African features (without any fake hair or skin-lightening makeup) and the other group use pornography with “mainstream” aesthetics. My reckless assumption based on my teenaged empirical conclusions is that there will be a “racial” correlation to relative sexual arousal. Maybe research like this has been done before? I am not saying that “white women” cannot sexually arouse me. I am saying that some Black men will take a few seconds longer to be aroused by images of Black women because they are so sexually conditioned for non-Black female bodies. I wonder what a pornography book in modern-day Lagos looks like? Is it full of actual African women or…?
• Another more deeply revealing psychological study is to test the person “of color” in interracial relationships for who their first choice for a mate was. It is just possible that the “interracial” relationship is often a kind of “marriage of convenience” after “same race” failure. Decades ago this old brother who was married to a “white woman” had to take the time to explain to a younger, more idealistic me that he “could not find” a Black woman to marry. I think he was trying to tell me that marrying a “white woman” was not his first choice but participating in any marriage is more important than the color of his woman’s skin. This is a sophisticated twist on the idealistic white liberal statement that “love knows no color.”What these words try to support is the notion that relationships are based on complex aesthetic choices. So my mature response to the “black guy” hooking up with the “white girl” is framed in the context of these aesthetic choices. Aesthetics is not just for museum curators and wine tasters. Everyone has a sense of aesthetics, whether they know it or not. When a typical, angry “black guy” whines and complains about these interracial issues, often there is the assumption that the “offender” can simply switch back to Black and it will be cool.

At the risk of more ostracism based accusations of “reverse racism,” let me dare say that a real, mature, progressive Black woman is profoundly different from a properly-assimilated woman of empire (without regard to her skin color). You can’t just ‘switch’ from a full-featured Black woman and start dating Halle Berry or Vivica A. Fox. When you are in “love” with Halle or Vivica, then truly “love knows no color” as you evaluate the cultural root of the aesthetics. Here in the rasx() context, it is wrong to critique Seal about his choice for a mate when he rejected the likes of Halle or Vivica for his current wife. I’ve pissed off Negro sisters before when I say this but there is no real difference. What is deeper is that the likes of Halle or Vivica are in direct aesthetic competition with Seal’s wife—so why should Seal bother with colored women preoccupied with white beauty standards—why not just go white?

Aesthetics is informed by cultural education. You will never, ever hear an American business owner say something like, “I really would have liked to hire Bryan Wilhite because his technical skills are exemplary. The problem is that his sense of aesthetics make it impossible for him to enjoy being in our presence. This clearly stems from a cultural difference that makes it rather difficult for us to interact with him in our family way enmeshed with professionalism.” No. There will be something “uncomfortable” about Bryan… Bryan seemed like he was “hiding something” during the job interview… Bryan makes one feel “suspicious”… However, a guy like Seal is aesthetically capable of hanging with the big boys—so Seal gets the big business deal. One of the by products of his sense of aesthetics is his ability to become profoundly and unlimitedly intimate with Heidi Klum. So it should be no accident that the majority of economic elites “of color” have Heidi Klum aesthetic sensibilities… My aesthetic exploration of this “interracial” issue is in a collection of spoken word recordings called “Invisible Man”; click on the track called “girlfriend is paula cole.”

Meanwhile, on the other “side” of the world, once Blackness starts to ‘mess’ with Africaness then the issue grows to monumental scale. Any basic student of pre-colonial Africa knows that the family is the foundation of government. Destroying the African family destroys the government. This unity of family and state was set in place before the word “racism” was coined and knowledge of this heritage makes modern-day “interracial relationships” very difficult because such relationships threaten the stability of authentic African government (not to be confused with military dictatorships and other contemporary African cleptocracies). In the case of Nile Valley civilizations for example, a “mixed marriage” literally meant mixing matriarchy and patriarchy. Can you imagine the tumult from having matriarchs and patriarchs in the same family? Such a mixture is literally of Biblical proportions and apocalyptic in its gravity. Notice how skin color doesn’t even come into my conversation here…

In “LIBRadio Sampler: Three Sons of Africa” here in the kinté space, click on the “Amen Ra Neter: Nefertiti and Shemesh Worship” link to listen to just how huge this “interracial” thing is for the “evolution” of African civilization.

rasx()