Happy Blog Against Racism Day!

In lieu of a well-thought-out post, I present two brief anecdotes about race and aesthetic relativism.

• X. is a generally right-thinking person who abhors mustaches* - which is, of course, the aesthetic preference of all right-thinking persons, because large mustaches unbalanced by equally large beards are objectively hideous things that look like they’re eating your face, and small mustaches without beards make you look like Hitler. Pure untrammeled facial hair is okay, though, as are various combinations of small mustaches and mini-beards. Anyway, we were talking about how much we hate solo mustaches. X. mentioned that he was having a hard time finding porn featuring Latino models sans mustache. He’d like to diversify his porn collection, but mustaches are a deal-breaker for him (as they should be), and he feels vaguely guilty about this.

  On a cursory (and totally innocent! cough) search I managed to find more Latino men sans mustache than otherwise. So maybe X. is remembering non-mustached Latino men as non-Latino, or maybe he inhabits an area of pr0nland where this is more of an issue. And as much as I love talking about theories of sexuality with my housemates, there are some questions to which I would rather not know the answer.

• I think most bright colors should only be worn by really really dark people. Maybe some near-albinos can manage it as well, but certainly most white-to-medium-brown people I’ve seen wearing bright orange or turquoise just look like they’re being swallowed by the Pantone beast and their faces will disappear any minute. If you have enough pigment you can slay the Pantone beast and wear its corpse as a trophy. Which is a tortured and shitty metaphor, but hopefully you understand what I’m getting at?

  Once I was out with M., and we saw one such radiantly black woman in bright orange. So I marveled at how fabulous she looked, and explained my theory. M. thought it made me some kind of “Black is Beautiful” revolutionary. And I hope that’s the case, because it would be awesome to help tear down white supremacy, even in a little tiny frivolous way, by simply repeating my opinions loudly and often. Much easier than examining my own prejudices, for sure. But I still feel, I dunno, kinda weird and Othering-y about it.

All the cool kids are hanging out:

1. at Blog Against Racism HQ or
2. at the Tuesday afternoon tectonophysics poster session. I hope you’ll excuse me, I have figure captions to write.

*”Moustache” only outweighs “mustache” by about 10% on Google, and they’re both regarded as legitimate by most dictionaries. I can’t figure out what signals I’m sending by my choice of spelling. Help?