House and field

The room

This is the last long thing I say on the tape, and I say it because I could feel the episode ending without the point being made. I start with an apology I still stand by — to black people, on behalf of mixed people who have made a personality out of the lighter half of themselves.

The argument is a history lesson I had given myself years earlier. Under slavery the lighter-skinned were put in the house and the darker-skinned in the field, and the house learned to look down on the field because that was the design. People say slavery is over. I say we are still mentally enslaved, and colorism is the proof — the rivalry between dark skin and light skin is not banter, it is the house and the field still running, without a plantation.

Years later I wrote an essay with the same title as these lines. I did not go back to the tape to write it; I found the tape afterwards. That is the pattern this archive keeps turning up: the argument existed on tape before the events it now frames, and before the essays that now explain it.

I say “that’s embarrassing” at the end. I meant it about the people who celebrate their Eurocentric features. I did not mean it about the length of the run. That was needed.