But Not Too Black/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Rogue: "It was an accident!"
Kevin Murphy: "Your career, Halle Berry - just an accident of genetics!"
I mean, gross. Look...She's just so..BLACK!
Sir Mix-a-Lot, the intro to Baby Got Back.

Paint my face in your magazines
Make it look whiter than it seems
Paint me over with your dreams

Shove away my ethnicity
Nelly Furtado, Powerless
When you watch this schmaltzy ad, you slowly come to the realization that the theme is, "If your epidermis isn't white enough, the man of your dreams will never love you."...Over the ad's next four installments the girl wins her man back thanks to her brand new pallor. Well, that and his new girlfriend was a total bitch...We'd like to think the antagonist tries to win him back by whitening her skin even more, and the two women end up bleaching back and forth until they both look like yetis.
"[Harry Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he said privately."
Game Change, page 37
"Possibly the first and only cliche in history I've wanted to bang, curly-haired black women are the preferred marketing tool to sell obscure telecom products and telephone services so long as their skin tone isn't too dark. She should be dark enough to score that hip diversity dollar, but not so dark as to scare away that heartland racist dollar."
"The new Resident Evil 5 footage indicates that Capcom are counteracting the accusations of racism by including an African female sidekick resembling a white woman who's been dipped in tea."
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, video game journalist
"Why am I beige?"
Frozone, watching his own hideous Seventies Animated Adaptation, The Incredibles

Archer: What about Lana? She's black... ish.
Lana: "Ish"?

Archer: Well, what's the word for it, Lana? You flipped out when I used "quadroon"!
Archer, "Diversity Hire"
"Why is it felt that the more diluted our traditionally African features become the more aesthetically acceptable we are considered? It was said in the 1960s and the sentiment seems to be forgotten, "Black is Beautiful." Wow, nearly 50 years later and is that now only meant for a specific shade?"