Just for the record, we are not in, nor has there ever been, a post-racial moment in America.  And so, we must dive deep into historical memory of this country to understand why all the fuss about L’Oréal’s  latest advertisement for cosmetics featuring Beyoncé.

Racial Passing
Centuries ago, before Black was defined as beautiful, those individuals whose features (nose, hair, lips) and color suggested European ancestry hid the origins of their one Black parent and “passed.”  These offspring were generally the result of a liaison between a white man and Black woman, and on occasion, between a Black man and a white woman.  The latter unions were often the motivation for lynchings in an effort to protect “white womanhood.”  And, most often, the former unions occurred under duress, power imbalances and were all too frequent a consequence of a white male slave owner taking control of what he deemed his property—the bodies of Black women. 

February 5, 2012, I spent the day at a sports bar for almost five hours trying to discern what attracted so many to the event known as “Super Bowl Sunday?”  In some ways this article is a tribute to a late colleague, Dr. Walter Dozier, who was both a professional journalist and anthropologist, specializing in—you guessed it, the anthropology of sports