EGGPLANT

I work at an equipment center at The New School.  I mostly slang digital cameras, projectors, and audio recorders to myopic Millennials.  And while the hourly rate is regrettable,  I am grateful for the stellar health insurance coverage.  I am twenty years removed from the time-sensitive angst of what-do-I-do-now-ism, parties-gone-awry and the overwhelming burden of keeping up with the latest in pop culture, but the student workers do provide a veritable feast of gossip.  I eats it up.  Especially in the summer.  The frantic pace of the academic year is replaced by latitude.  We shoot the shit and I offer unasked for advice because I'm grown and that's what aunties do.  In fact, just today I found myself an admonisher.  Oogling the image of a Tinder match for one of the students.  He was at least 35% eggplant, 65% chocolate.  And she, who we lovingly refer to as Goth Barbie, cuts a creamy figure, dying her naturally blonde hair a deeper shade for dramatic effect.  Loving Day celebrations notwithstanding, still, it feels like a slow blink/eye roll situation. A reminder of how successful the marketing is, of both black masculinity, and white feminity, as the mascots for late capitalism sex appeal.  Admittedly, I'm an unintended celibate, but this is a structural critique too (no hateration in this danceree). It's the white women who emphasize the general wackness of hetero-normative white dudes as partial reasoning for their dating of black men, that makes me suspicious. I mean we all know that white dudes generally possess an unsexy privilege blind spot, but I wonder why these BECKYS think that somehow black men are immune to a similar fuckery.  The eggplant is no protection against that. Trust.  But here we are, in 2018, the year of all-pink-everything, and white women, under the age of 25, are already fully subscribed -- in spite of the 'We Should All Be Feminist' merchandise.  My guess is that she, and others of her sisteren, will still dabble in the brown dick down for sport.  Justifying a black dude's relative take charge demeanor as a kind of amusement park courtship. And lowkey,  I'll be waiting with a listening ear, gobbling up the tender morsels, like a storytime on The YouTubes (age bracket 18 - 24).  I just hope they spend a sliver of their youth not getting played by a remix of the super masculine menial or the omnipotent administrator.  Because the more you dabble, the harder it is to see beyond the fable.