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• OwOarchist@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Black people aren’t charcoal black.

  According to old-timey racists, they are.

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  • ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Exactly … according to old-timey racists in the 1950s … this is what they imagined about black people

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  • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I mean I’m terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You’d think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.

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    • jaybone@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      You mean Halle Berry?

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      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        No like two decades earlier

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• ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  In the 1950s … to average white people who might have never seen a black person before … they would imagine this

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  • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I can promise you that the vast majority of white Americans had seen a black person in the 1950s.

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    • f314@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      This is a British book, though

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      • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        With the war and influx of American GIs and Britain, not to mention their colonies, I stand by my statement for Britain as well.

        What helps in the case of the UK is a larger percentage of their population lives in cities than the US too. Just by the math living in urban areas you’re just going to see more people and more people from outside your community will be come in.

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      • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I don’t think minstrel shows with black face were common in Britain?

        It’s more likely that white British people took it as “much darker than the skin we’re assuming for people” which is enough to make the simile work.

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    • Atomic@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I know it’s difficult to grasp the idea that the world is larger than just the US. But you’ll juat have to try.

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      • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I mean let’s be real minstrel shows are explicitly a western concept. Go down another comment and I addressed the UK as well, but really that’s going to apply anywhere Americans were during WW2 as well.

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      • zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        lies, lies! foreign countries are just made up for the movies

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• Midnight1938@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?

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  • Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Alright, that’s actually pretty funny.

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• Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that’s how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I’d seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).

  My friend is also charcoal black, so that’s definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).

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• Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’m just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn’t as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of “black” that maybe wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years ago.

  Just a random thought

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• rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.

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