NASTYTINGS

Heterosexual - I’m a Coke fan

Homosexual -  I’m a Pepsi fan

Bisexual - I’m a fan of both. Not at the same time,  but either is fine.

Polygamist - I mix mine together sometimes. Other times I just have a bunch of cans of one at a time.

Transsexual - I drink my Coke out of a Pepsi glass or vise versa.

Pansexual - Its all just soda to me, I drink whatever I’m in the mood for.

The Breakfast Club came out in 1985 and to this day is, in my opinion, one of the greatest damn movies ever to barely even have a script.

During the famous “dance” scene, Molly Ringwald, who played the “princess” Claire, was supposed to a small little dance by herself, but she was shy so all of them did some dancing together, creating one of the most famous film scene’s to date. It was improvised.

During the scene in the film where the characters sat down and told why they were there, there was NO SCRIPT. John Huges told the cast to sit there and improvise why they thought their characters were there, creating that heart wrenching scene everyone could relate to.

EVERYONE can relate to this movie and thats the best damn thing. 

On March 24, 1984, five students entered a detention room thinking it was just another Saturday. Before the day was over, they broke the rules, bared their souls, and touched each other in a way they never dreamed possible.

tw: mention of hate crime/racism

To make a very very very very very complicated history of colorism grossly over simplified at least when it comes to America – darker women of color were always seen as uglier which is a mentally ingrained stigma due to the fact that the darker you were in the time of slavery and Jim Crow the more likely you are to be put to harsher physical labor or lynched.

I know people who are of an older generation than me that weren’t allowed to date anybody darker than a brown paper bag, because their parents had experienced the trauma of seeing dark people face horrifying punishment. 

That and the “drop of black blood“ law. People in the south who were only 1/10 black couldn’t get married to other white people. (For perspective, I writing this am 1/10 white and it plays absolutely no role in my life as a black woman)

The more white passing you were, and the less black ancestry you had the less likely you were to get rights taken away from you or worse.

And this didn’t just extend to work or slavery. Consider Dorothy Dandridge who I think is one of the most beautiful people of all time getting significantly more work and praise than her darker counterparts. And Dorothy Dandridge was far from white passing but at least had the respect that was missed by other black actors because they were pigeonholed into acting darker usually less intelligent domestic workers. And I adore Dorothy Dandridge with you every iota of my being.

(Dorothy “The Black Marilyn Monroe” Dandridge and Fredi Washington vs Louise Beavers who played Washington‘s mother in Imitation of Life, 1934. Even being the fairer and biracial, Washington was restricted from work in the film industry for being not completely white.)

The same can be said for Rosa Parks.

People forget that Rosa Parks deciding not to move to the back of the bus was a plan by the NAACP. The person who did it first and gave her the idea was Claudette Colvin, who they decided could not be the face of protest partially because she was a pregnant teenager but also partially because Rosa Parks was significantly lighter than her and therefore more relatable/less harmful to white audiences. Claudette was fine with this because otherwise it would’ve risked her life. 

(Left: Claudette Colvin, Right: Rosa Parks)

Again - and I’m a film student so apologies that so many examples are actors - look at Hattie McDaniel, the first black person to ever win an Oscar vs. Halle Berry the first and so far only black woman to ever win Best Actress. Whose story are you more likely to hear?

All shades of brown skin are beautiful in their own way, and this is why people like Alek Wek, Lupita Nyong’o, and Sydney Poitier are important just as Zendaya, Dorothy Dandridge, and Angela Davis are. 

Colorism now is flighty and irresponsible and discriminatory, but wanting to be lighter in the past century was a survival mechanism. The more you blend in with the majority populous (white land owners)  the less likely you are to be looked down upon.

Unfortunately that got co-opted into a different mentality.

Rather than “I now see that certain people desired to be a certain shade so they wouldn’t get killed/lose resources like housing, freedom, or work” - the thought process became “because lighter people got more resources and propagated into the zeitgeist they are therefore the only images of beauty I can see. This must mean that darker is considered uglier.”

Every single one of these shades is beautiful

Anyway, thank you for noticing that I do my best to raise up other people of color. Again, this is only going from an American perspective, because other continents/countries have different relationships with racial identity and color.💖