(ThyBlackMan.com) Not long ago, my eleven-year-old daughter and I were walking home from a local eatery when an elderly Black woman, perhaps seventy, stopped us, and observingly stated, “She’s real pretty for a dark skinned girl!”
Instantly, I was inflamed. However, before I could word a response, my daughter replied, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” the senior said and sauntered off.
I was well aware of the indirect implications of the woman’s comments; but, I had no way to gauge the subliminal or long term effects that such a statement would have upon my daughter’s psyche. Fuming with anger, I immediately thought of THEM (my acronym for four historically Black universities: Tuskegee, Howard, ECBC and Morgan)!
For starters, I am forever skeptical of Tuskegee University because of their part in a horrific syphilis experiment. I also have deep concerns about the recent resignation of ECSU school chancellor, Dr. Willie Gilchrist, amongst allegations of turning a blind eye to campus criminality. In addition, I think MSU would fare better if it shied away from beleaguered, pay-for-play basketball coach Todd Bozeman.
However, my present dissatisfaction resurfaced when my memory reminded me of the time when our beloved school of higher learning, Howard University, allowed sororities and fraternities to practice colorism against dark skinned people with such crackpot experiences like The Brown Paper Bag tests and The Ruler exams. 
For any of Howard Universities’ staff members and upper classmen to tell students that it is a prerequisite that their facial complexions must be lighter than that of a brown paper bag in order to join a Black fraternity, or that their hair must be as straight as a metric ruler in order to be admitted to a Black sorority is, at best, spiritual emasculation coupled with mental fratricide.
If countless Black Americans are still suffering from remnants of slavery from centuries past, how could highly educated Black leaders not foresee the perpetual destructive color tensions and damages that they spearheaded a little over fifty years ago? If these Black intellectuals perpetuated mental fratricide, how can they expect the lowly, mildly educated Black youth not to participate in barbaric, physical fratricide? The nerve of THEM hypocrites!
Black universities are the educational and informational guardians of Black Americans who have been orphaned, abandoned, and disconnected from their motherland and history. These institutions have a social obligation and moral responsibility to the betterment of Black life, not simply light-skinned, yellow-skinned, and brown-skinned Black life. And, when these mentally imbalanced surrogate parents intentionally and deliberately misguided, misadvised, misled, misrepresented and misinformed their own future: their offspring; the U.S. Department of Education, in conjunction with the DOJ, should have immediately slapped them with a fiery, scathing indictment for crimes against humanity!
I would have expected this sordid behavior from PSYCH: Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Columbia or Harvard. However, contrary to some of our educators, I discovered that PSYCH’s secret societies looked after their own. A prime example can be found at Yale University with members from Skull and Bones. Prescott Bush, a Skull and Bone member, was a politician, financier, and Yale graduate who fathered George H.W. Bush, another Skull and Bone associate and Yale alumnus.
G.H.W. Bush eventually served as Director of the CIA and then as America’s 41st President. He was directly responsible for the War on Drugs, a euphemism for the mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of millions of Black Americans, especially those suffering from self-hate and low self-esteem.
At bare minimum, the 20th century straight ruler and brown bag tests partially explains the swift and permanent exodus from Black America by southern-bred, dark-skinned intellectuals such as Chief Justice, Clarence Thomas and former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. They were never good enough for THEM in the first place.
It also arms conspiracy theorists with evidentiary ammunition which infers that educated Blacks leaders were in cahoots with powerful, racist whites to keep certain groups from rising above sub-human levels of social, political and economic inferiority.
However, I won’t allow any of that self-abasing rhetoric to cloud my vision. My daughter is an extremely pretty girl. She is not a pretty dark-skinned girl. The brown paper bag and the ruler were/are ugly litmus tests. And the despicable behaviors and character flaws displayed by administers and proponents of such exams were testimonial acts verifying and solidifying their own imperishable and ineradicable ugliness!
Staff Writer; Saint Solomon
Official website; http://www.SaintSolomon.com
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