Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, you're listening to a bonus episode of Ratchet and Respectable.

One of the perks of this rapidly growing blog is that I can reach out to some of the most

amazing thinkers and ask them if they'll talk to me and they actually say yes. One of the amazing

people that I reached out to recently was Melissa Valle. She is an assistant professor in both the

Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of African-American and African

Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. So I called her up when I was working on the black

face episode and I talked to like a bunch of people, the conversation started with black face

and then it just sort of meandered to a whole bunch of black-black-ass topics. We had an amazing

conversation and I didn't want to skip another week of covering pop culture because so much

is happening right now and I really thought it was a great conversation to share. I can tell you

a couple of things that we talk about in this one-on-one. We talked about black fishing, specifically

Ariana Grande, which I thought her name was Grande for a really long time because I thought she had

some sort of Latina background. I knew she was Italian but I thought she was partially Italian.

I don't know. For some reason I thought the girl had some extra melanin in her life. There's a

really popular blog that's been circulating that has a picture of her from when she first started out

and she's like white white super white and usually when you see her she's very tan. One of the

pictures in the article it was Ariana Grande performing with Nicki Minaj and she was darker than

Nicki who you know is a black-black black girl. That took us to the Frankenstein-ing of Black Beauty.

If you listen to hip hop lyrics you'll hear guys talk about they want a certain type of hair

texture but this Brazilian Filipino eyes but guys tend to cherry pick the different traits that they

want in a woman. It's this weird mixed fetish that is the end result. We talked about I don't know

if you saw it. There was a viral post going around some football player and his friends and their

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