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I stayed away from the recent Pacquiao-Mosley boxing match because I wasn’t willing to spend any amount of money to watch a fight in which I knew the outcome before it started. During and after the fight, though, the social networking universe was abuzz with the adulation of Shane Mosley’s new Cuban girlfriend, model Bella Gonzalez, who got captured screaming in support of her man as he got  refurbished by a five-foot tall Filipino.

A quick Google Image search justified that Bella is indeed bad as all outdoors, with an absurd frame that no straight man with functioning optics could deny. It also didn’t escape me that the only vocal admirers of Bella that I encountered, from rappers to actors to my boys, were black men.

It got me thinking about our country’s European standard of beauty – the lighter the skin and longer the hair, the better – and how it applies to most black men. The portrayal of the black male antagonist as a lover of pretty, skinny blonde women is recidivistic in crappy black films, and any bitter single sister who ever saw a good-looking brother with a white woman on his arm will tell you that Caitlin is the worst thing that ever happened to us since the Middle Passage.

But if there’s one thing that most black men I know DON’T want, it’s a skinny, waifish blonde woman straight from Finland. Not even close. Any man can recognize the beauty in women from any corner of the globe, but chances are if she pops up in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, she won’t get a “daaaammn!” from a brother.

The pattern I detect is that most black men gravitate toward something in-between a deep-chocolate, bald Sudanese woman and a pretty white girl hailing from a country with bad food. That’s why so many video chicks and black celebrity eye candy are Asian-black hybrids or of the Hispanic varietal.

I think we’re all conditioned to gravitate toward long, flowy hair on any woman – the consequences are which a host of unfortunate lace-fronts and terrible wigs on sisters – and skin that isn’t too dark; I simply don’t see Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan or Shane Mosley with an Alek Wek.

Just the same, it bothers me that a Google search of Wek pulls up “Alek Wek ugly” as her second-most-popular search, because she certainly is not.

Ladies, do you find more solace in knowing that the majority of black men don’t want their women lily-white? Do you feel like you with have to “white” yourselves up a bit for beauty? Do you wanna stab a Cuban woman?

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