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Is Drake vs Kendrick Lemar, a 21st century rerun of Marcus Garvey vs WEB Dubois?
Yes or no?
The complexities of Black life have always been with us and it has never taken much for colorism to rear its ugly head.
The notion that lighter is better has dominated our discourse for several centuries and it doesn’t look like it is going anywhere.
Alice Walker’s Color Purple, which was adapted for the big screen did bring these issues to life in the most compelling way imaginable.
And countless other Black writers including Noble prize winning author-Toni Morriston-in her seminal work-The Bluest eye.
Walter Mosley’s Devil In a Blue Dress did also capture the extraordinary tragedy of the white passing Daphne Monet, whose real name was Ruby Hanks.
But you can argue that this subject was much more compelling when William Edward Burghardt Dubois, the author of the Souls of Black folk, went head to head with the Jamaican pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey.
There really shouldn’t have been an issue between both men, given that they were fighting for the same thing: the liberation and elevation of Black folks everywhere.
The light skinned American, by way of his fancy degrees from Fisk, Friedrich Wilhelm and Harvard universities…