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It’s always an interesting exercise to take a trip down memory lane and ask my other college chums what ever happened to “so and so,” what are they up to these days. The conversation gets particularly interesting when you find that someone in college is living a completely different life, post grad.

One such girl was, for lack of a better term, “out here” back when we were in school. We’ll call her Tracey. Maybe it wasn’t so much that Tracey was out here, but she always had a story to tell about her recent sexcapades, which made it seem like she was out here. We were drastically different but I found her fascinating for many reasons but mostly because though she, a Black woman, expressed interest in being around and dating Black men, she almost exclusively dated White dudes. They just gelled.

Flash forward three years after college and the free spirited, sexually liberated Tracey was one of the first girls from college to get married, and then shorty after that, pregnant. It never even occurred to me that Tracey would even want to be married with a kid and certainly not that soon. But that was her story.

I mentioned her when I met up with another friend from college, in her hometown. We were talking about her radical transformation when my friend said, “You’re probably going to be mad at me for saying this, but you know her baby is going to be so cute, with that good hair.”

She was wrong. I wasn’t mad at her for saying that, just severely disappointed. She wasn’t saying her baby was going to be cute because her husband was cut from the pages of GQ or had some type of uniquely exquisite hair. She said it because her husband is White and Tracey is still Black. Apparently, a White daddy and a Black mother were the formula for adorable children with “good hair.”

Of course I told her about her backwards thinking. But long after we said goodbye to one another, I was still saddened by her comments; not only because she’d made them, but also for the scads of Black people who seem to think just like her. Frustrated, I kept replaying the conversation over and over in my mind, coming up with new responses and retorts. My favorite was: “Tracey is the cute one in that relationship.  It’ll be her Black a– that makes that baby beautiful.” But I realized that was just mean and I’m glad I didn’t say it in the moment. I just wanted something shocking to jolt her out of her antebellum-like thinking.

And I’m not exaggerating y’all.

The ranking of lighter skinned, curly or wavy hair-textured Black folk is deeply rooted in the philosophies and practices of slavery, where children, who were the result of rapes between slave master and slave, were given preferential treatment on the plantation, afforded the opportunity to work in the house, out of the hot sun, avoiding grueling types of labor.

Unfortunately, instead of Black people recognizing the twisted logic behind this system, we internalized it, believing that to have lighter skin meant you were better, upper class, smarter, stuck up, overly sensitive, soft etc.

Really, more than anything this system, just helped to further demonize Black, African features and further uplift Eurocentric ones, as if we need Caucasian blood to be attractive.

It was with this sentiment in mind that YouTube vlogger Franchesca Ramsey spoke about the Black community’s fetishization with “mixed babies,” basically telling us it’s time we cut it out.

It needed to be said.

Check out the video below.

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