Her father and members of his family had been members of a fraternal organization in NY called ‘The Metropolitans’. It was one of apparently many old social clubs that were popular in the 40s and 50s. It was just an astounding trip to see all of these young fashionable people and know that they stuck together socially. I don’t recall if they had any type of paper bag test, nor do I recall them being particularly light or dark, but I do remember that the Metropolitans were one of many and that all of them were gone.

In my reading of American history, the integration of the civil service and the falling of the color bar for professional service obviated the need for blacks in the managerial and professional classes to remain absolutely wed to a black clientele. In both directions, integration decimated that intimacy of black supply and black demand.

When I went to college in 1982, one of my sponsors was a black ladies bridge club. Their scholarship was one of the smallest, but I remember it most fondly. They were the only sponsors I wrote back to personally after thanking them for the award. I wanted to let them know how I was doing in college. It’s difficult for me to imagine any such thing happening today, although I’m sure it must happen somewhere – but I’ve always been acutely aware of how we have become less dependent on the black upper class.

Old photos such as yours trigger these kinds of thoughts and memories and I think of the sort of men I aspired to be when reading ‘Who’s Who in Negro America’. These days I am lamenting the fall from grace and dissolution of that social monopoly, even though I know that we brought it upon ourselves.

On skin hue…

I’ve been really interested in the way that race is reproduced over space and time. this is one of the reasons I’ve been putting up so much french hip-hop. Here we have a society (france) in which race officially is nonexistent. The state doesn’t collect data on race, and neither do most institutions of civil society. but yet and still people we’d think of as “black” still “represent” like black men. How does this cross borders? How is this passed down?

Pictures like these are more beautiful to me than the finest productions of the Italian Renaissance–not for their surface aesthetic qualities, but for what they represent. They represent us at our very strongest, at are very best. These are the types of pictures we should never stop admiring.

“Light skinned American blacks tend to get more “stuff” than those who are darker in hue.”

You know, it wasn’t until I read up on the history and cultures of South Africa that I realized how much they mirrored the U.S. on this. There, they had (and probably still have) Whites, Coloreds (those who would be labeled “light-skinned” or “mixed-race” Blacks in the U.S.), and Blacks. The lighter one got in Apartheid-era South Africa, the more prestige one enjoyed due to one’s phenotypical traits, all other things remaining equal.

When skin hue matters that much in a society, it probably matters so much because the dominant culture benefits the most from everyone placing different values on hue.