One Open Email to Dr. Margo Crawford
You got Darryl emailing me with renewed energy. You see the power of Margo-ness in this particular form? Anyway, he sent me this:
This clip reminds me of the whole "skin fetish" discussion we had years ago. It is unfortunate that the generation younger than us are still having these color issues. It is very fortunate that we are still able to see the value of documenting this problem. For the record these are the highlights of my findings years later:
It was quite a profoundly surprising discovery to find that a woman with a rich, full, melanin complexion may assume you are complimenting the color of her physical appearance because it is the "politically correct" thing to do. In some the worst cases of these cynical observations, she will accept that your compliments are sincere but that you are somehow "stupid" or "sick" to have such a high opinion of her. In this terribleness, she is may escalate to playing the role of detective, out to prove that I am guilty of hiding my "true self" from her. She is determined to discover the real complex, brittle reasons why my gaze falls upon her.
What is even stranger, is that she can receive the same compliment from a person she would describe as a “white man” and she will accept his compliment and, in the extreme, build a sexual, intimate world filled with ceremonies that worship her body as the fetish. For more on this, please see the “Let There Be Q” section in “rasx() on Media: Billboards and Postcards” here:
http://www.kintespace.com/rasx34.html
This was all a mystery to my young, white-liberal self until the possibility came to me that, as long as she does not have to see me and my dark skin, she is not reminded that she is hiding her true self from herself. It is possible that she was projecting her guilt onto me. Since “everybody knows” we Black men are inferior, it is impossible for her to assume that this hiding self from self is completely alien to me. It is impossible for me to be nowhere year the places she travels, in the lowlands of Hebron so far from Zion...