Maya Angelou?

We should. And bring Hil.

Yeah. Really a brain fart to mentally block on Maya Angelou. Much worse than not remembering Doris Lessing. If I can't remember William Shakespeare I'll really start worrying.

Now trying to remember the skin color description - Caramel, and bitter chocolate and cocoa with milk. Not exactly those but a whole list of ways to describe the variety of skin tones.

Still not remembering the poem. Maybe I never heard the title. Mayou read it out loud while being interviewed. She wrote it as a lighthearted piece when a white friend was describing a black friend and either did not know any words to describe skin tone or was too scared to describe skin tone to a Black person. So Maya Angelou wrote a whole poem explaining how to describe different skin shades "Mocha with a swirl" that sort of thing. When she read it she got that purr in her voice she sometimes get when she's reading something playful instead of something somber.

There's a poem by a black man, I think, describing talking to a landlady on the phone who wanted to know how black he was before agreeing to rent to him. It ends with him saying wouldn't it be simpler if he just came over?

Yeah, that is dealing with something less lighthearted, internal racism within the black community over lightness or darkness. And in fact Maya Angelou has dealt with that a lot. But this poem is trying to deal with all this just a physical description, describing skin tone for the same reasons you would describe hair color - so you would know what people look like.

interesting to me because gradations of hue, height and features played a predominant role in the social hierarchy of hispanic NM. And even that descriptor is challenged. Latino/mexican/hispanic. Depends on where you landed in history. Next door neighbors with a direct line to the gov and history back to the spaniards called themselves hispanic, as did most politically affiliated folk. Latino was those who'd gone more global, possibly even white, not locals, imports, intermarriages. Mexican was a shy away from derogatory, and there were further degrees in that.

It's fascinating and alarming at once.

Is it an outward express of classism, somehow? There aren't a lot of shades of white/pink/beige/pale, but boy howdy, there's the trailer trash and everyone else.

Gar, it's not Human Family is it? [link]

The one that I think is quite beautiful, but thematically totally different is Passing Time [link]