Issue #1,053 Thursday, July 22, 2026
Beauty like this don’t lie
If melanin were a person, he/she would probably be the most powerful and influential person on Earth. Certainly in the United States. Because melanin is the deciding factor in skin color, and skin color – throughout history – has had the power to dictate who was the ruler and who got ruled, who was considered beautiful and who was not, who was enslaved and who did the enslaving.
Black skin has rarely been promoted as a positive. Hell, black anything is rarely a positive. Black sheep of the family. White hat vs. Black hat. It’s bad luck if a black cat crosses your path. On and on.
Where It Rains in Color is an excellent science fiction novel written by Denise Crittendon, a good friend and fellow Afrofuturist. A central theme of Crittendon’s novel, which has received considerable acclaim, is that Black skin is precious. And the darker the skin, the more precious it becomes. The most beautiful women – who are the darkest skinned- are known as the Rare Indigo. Crittendon’s premise is a refusal to accept what most of us have been taught – covertly as well as overtly- that the color black is the mark of the beast. Instead, it is a mark of the blessed.
You may already be familiar with the MAGA histrionics surrounding the extraordinary – and extraordinarily popular and profitable - movie The Odyssey, which my wife and I saw last weekend. Predictably, MAGA is enraged that the ridiculously gorgeous Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy. Why? Because according to Greek mythology, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world. And not only is Lupita of Troy a Black woman, she is a very, very dark-skinned Black woman. And she is fine as hell, as we brothers might like to say. Suffice to say it’s not a reach to consider Lupita in the running as one of the most beautiful women evuh.
Which is totally unacceptable to Elon Musk, incontrovertibly whiter-than-white white supremacist supreme who became the world’s first trillionaire last month in June.
“Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award,” Musk was quoted as saying.
Nolan produced, wrote, and directed The Odyssey, which has received just as many rave reviews as it has mocking criticisms of Elon’s racist temper tantrums about a fictional character in a fictional movie where Lupita’s actual appearance time in the three-hour-long epic amounts to somewhere between 10-15 minutes, according to AI Google, which matches up with what would have been my estimate.
But then check out what historian extraordinaire Kahlil Greene points out:
“Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opened July 17 with Lupita Nyong’o, a Black actor, cast as Helen of Troy. Conservatives in the US and far-right accounts in Greece called it an erasure of Greek heritage.
“Here is what those same voices stayed quiet about.
“In the early 1800s, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire pried marble sculptures off the actual Parthenon in Athens and shipped them to London. They have sat in the British Museum since 1816.”
One of these is a movie. The other is the real thing, still gone. Guess which one got called erasure.”
Game. Set. Match.
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