My People, My People...

Before I go in on y'all, I just wanna say hey :) how was your weekend? Mine was wonderful, thanks for asking. I got in to some ish, but that's for another post...

Today has been an extremely boring day at work. And although Brad did his best to entertain me, my attention just couldn't be held to any one thing. Enter Fashion Bomb Daily. I will be the first to tell you that I don't have a lick of fashion sense. Not one iota in my whole body. I dress by what fits my freakishly long legs, big boobs, and hides the tummy. Weird combination, I know, but it works for me: men's jeans, fitted tees, and 'maternity' shirts are the pilars of my closet. But anywho, although I can't dress to save my life (did I mention that over half of the clothes in my closet are black?) I thouroughly enjoy cruising Fashion websites daily :) I have over 20 fashionista blogs in my favorites alone! So, of course FBD is the first and I just love their fashion bombshell of the day which happened to be Robyn of Off 4th and Graham. I'd never heard of this young woman, but I liked her style, so I decided to go through some of her older posts (mostly looking through pictures, but reading a lil too). I happened upon her post about dark skin and my jaw lit'rally dropped. The things that folks tweet in 2011 are un-freaking-believeable.

Robyn made an excellent point that we need do away with this notion that dark skin is not beautiful b/c this is not something we want to teach our children. Now, I must admit, I've been told that I have some sort of problem with skin color. Not of others though, of myself. I describe myself as brown. Period. Brown. Everyone else sees 'light skinned' and that irks the mess out of me. I've been asked was I mixed more times than I care to count (to which I always respond, "yes, with black and black") but that's the quickest way to get ignored for the rest of the conversation. I have been talked about for visiting tanning salons in the winter months and going to the beach to tan in the summer months. Why there's a problem with me loving having a darker skin tone is (and has been) amazing to me. How someone can be wrapped up in the color of someone else's skin color is more confusing than Chinese Arithmatic (no racism).

I guess what I'm getting at is this... on a scale of 1 to 5:

1 being Boris

2 being LL

3 being Mr. Andre Benjamin

4 being Taye

and 5 being Tyrese

I have to let y'all know; I'm about a 2 (but in my mind I'm a 3), my brother is a strong 5, my sister is a 3.5 and our youngest brother is a 4.5, and growing up we never thought about us all being different colors. We looked past color and saw love. This same thing happened when I was in middle school and met my bestfriend (longest standing to this day). She's white. Has been since the day she was born, will be after the day she dies. And I never saw anything but her. She wasn't white, she was cool ass cool and laughed at my corny jokes. Her family wasn't white, they were welcoming and treated me like family (still do). But I digress.

I guess what I'm trying to get at (other than a way to waste the rest of this work day) is that it's freaking 2011 and skin color is still on some poeple's mind? When will we be able to look past skin color and see the person? As corny as that sounds.

But for real, is this just like a Minnesota-nice way of thinking? Or are y'all Equal Opportunity Friends also? Does color matter to you, to any extent? Does this dark skin vs. light skin bother y'all as much as it does me or am I just being dramatic? Let me know, b/c this has been on my mind a lot lately. Peace <3 T