Teddy Grahams, Part I

Updated: Dec 3, 2024

What is our obsession with light-skin-did dudes (a.k.a.Teddy Grahams)? Back in the late 2010s, I worked at what they called a Community School in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.  From what I could gather, “Community School” basically means that it was a place where no white or Asian parents sent their kids to get their schooling.  The student body was made up of Blacks from predominantly Caribbean backgrounds with a smattering of Dominicans and recent immigrants from Yemen.  It was a tiny middle school of about 130 sixth-, seventh- and eighth graders who were all well-behaved and respectful.  There were four or five really turrbull ones, though, and for some reason, the two very worst behaving kids were light skinned, biracial boys.  They were forever getting pulled out of class and yelled at by the dean and spent many days in the Chill Will Space (the name white liberals made us call the detention room for bad ass kids at the time).  

But something curious happened when the school hosted important guests like parents or administrators from the district offices.  The principal got the school ready by assigning tasks to the well-behaving kids (e.g., Karina and Shaima would accompany guests to the meeting room.  Raheem and Jaylen would show them to their seats while Lionel and Jobran served them coffee and snacks.).  But the two misbehaving, light skinned kids had a special job of their own.  The principal would literally pluck them from detention, place them at the front door of school and nudge them forward to greet these important people, making sure that theirs were the first faces these invited guests saw.  In her mind, having these boys at the front door was the way to give her school the most positive first impression possible.  This situation got me thinking.  I thought to myself, No matter the gravity of the fucked up shit you do, Black folks will find a way to forgive you if you’re a nice-looking Teddy Graham.  I call this the Chris Brown Effect.

Part II

The Chris Brown Effect 

Niggaz like Chris Brown STAY in the Chill Will Space.  Brown is a lawbreaker, misogynist and repeated abuser of women, but Fat Joe and Kelly Rowland and them be begging the public to exercise forgiveness and grace towards him.  Brown don’t need Kelly advocating for him because not even the beatdown he administered to America’s Sweetheart Rihanna stopped him from selling records, performing concerts and receiving awards, especially from the Black community.  No matter what he does, the Black community will give him a pass because his light skin somehow makes him more attractive than the average nigga.

Scientific studies have shown that attractive people are hired for better jobs, make more money, are more respected and get laid way more than the rest of us. And, for the most part, us darkies deem half-caste dudes to be more attractive than the average Joe.  Remember Jeremy Meeks, the Mugshot Bae? We literally unstrapped that Teddy Graham from the electric chair and put him on the runways of Milan based solely on his light eyes, dainty nose and lightly toasted skin.  That’s how much we love redbones.  They unite all of those physical characteristics we Americans hold in high esteem.  (If that brother looked exactly like he does but had a big gorilla nose like mine, he’d be burnt to a crisp on that chair.).

Teddy Grahams be cute, but they aren’t always the most attractive grapes of the bunch; they look serene and nonthreatening, so we entrust Teddy Grahams like Barack Obama and Colin Powell with our very livelihood because we don’t expect a light skin-did brother to go flying off the handle and start choking out Vladamir Putin during a UN meeting.  What kind of deep shit would the world be in if we sent a darky like Draymond Green to the G8 Summit? We need Teddy Grahams for that kind of delicate work.  And even when they mess up, like Chris Brown has done time and again, we are quick to forgive.  

Part III

What is a Teddy Graham, tho?

You all may know the Teddy Graham as a mulatto, octoroon, chromey, swirly, redbone, high yella, half breed, Cookies ‘N’ Cream, domino, half cast, Lite Brite, mongrel, house nigga, Oreo or (as George Jefferson used to say), Zebra.   They are the RumpelSilkskins of the world whose genetic make-up includes some level of negroid; Teddy Grahams tickle our imagination with visions of thick, ruby-red lips, a razor-thin nose, bushy eyebrows and good, nap-free tresses.  Teddy Grahams whisk around town weaving straw into golden threads of admiration and adulation wherever they go.  Some of them are so attractive that it almost hurts your eyes to look at them, but they also incite conflicting emotions.  They are sometimes accused of being too black for some and not black enough for others.  Historically, they created feelings of distrust among Blacks, accused of being double agents because of the advantage they held as house niggers, personal servants, and even concubines for white masters.

That’s why we love/hate them.  Think about Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes, who is an excellent athlete and a bona fide pecan sandy.  He went and named his octaroon son Bronze, a bold and cocky move considering that the boy’s skin tone will never achieve that color even in his wildest dreams.  We like Patrick for tryna represent by christening his super white son with a nigga name, but we also dog him out because his “blackness” comes across as pretty flimsy most of the time, especially considering that his white wife appears to be a Trumper.  But we let him slide. 

We hate on the Teddy Graham because he is a beneficiary of colorism.  Just go into Pinterest and type into the search box something like “good looking men”.  99% of them will be white.  Then type in “good looking Black men” and 99% of them will be of the high yella sort. If you want to see good looking men of the dark chocolate flavor, you will need to include the word “dark” as they are mostly set aside in a separate category.  That ain’t right!

Make America Miscegenate Again

I live in South America so everybody up in here is mixed with something.  There are enclaves of Blacks and indigenous groups who never mixed it up with Europeans but for the most part, every “white” guy you talk to got a Black grandma and every Black boy you cruise will mention his white cousins strewn about the country. Latinos have always been laid back about race mixing because their family pictures look like a box of crayons.  But the U.S., with its long history of race-based policy making and legislation, has never been openly comfortable with miscegenation.  The birth of a mulatto baby meant that your husband Jed had been poking around the slave quarters when your back was turned or that your wife had come down with an incurable case of Jungle Fever.  But this is changing in this country.

 LaMelo Ball.  H.E.R.  Juicy Smollay.  Kenny Lattimore.  Jake from State Farm.  We are in the Age of the Teddy Graham and things are only gonna get lighter and brighter over the next couple of generations.  Folks like Steph Curry are already Lite Brite and they go and have kids with a woman several shades lighter.  The Black Factor diminishes from quadroon (their parents) to octoroon (them) to hexadecaroon (their kids) to just plain white (their kids’ kids).  Want proof? Just peep at this picture of Quincy Jones surrounded by his offspring:  QuincyFamily. The pseudo-Blacks outnumber the black Blacks 20:2. Colin Kaepernick is a civil rights hero for taking a knee to draw attention to Black injustice, but when he took a knee to ask a saweetie for her hand in marriage, his choice was conspicuously lacking in melanin.

Part IV

Lite Meat vs. Dark Meat

White people embrace the Teddy Graham while regular Blacks torment them.  My Dad grew up in the segregated South, so I asked him if he had Teddy Grahams in his little school in 1960s South Carolina and he said yes, but they were bullied by the Wesley Snipes types.  Two generations later, I saw the same thing in the Brooklyn school, racial animosity being manifested through bullying of the few redbones, who not surprisingly turned around and acted out against their teachers. The Black kids also loathed Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, calling them “them white dudes”.  I worked for a quick minute at a turrbull charter school in East New York, where I swear that every kid had to show their 666 birthmark on their scalps before being registered. And you guessed it: the most odious kids were the octoroons who were often bullied by the darker others.

Are the biracial kids an easy target for the displaced hate we hold towards white people or is our vitriol based on jealousy of their loose and bouncy Shirley Temple curls? Teddy Grahams are cute and dark-skinned men are sexy.  But you know how it goes:  you suck the sexy man’s dick on the DL in a parked car after midnight.  But you marry the cute one.

Teddy Grahams in Movies and Music

The Teddy Graham male has not always had it so good in the realm of entertainment as they do today. Light skinned women like Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, Minnie Riperton, Lena Horne, Etta James (I didn’t know she was Black for the longest.), Vanessa Williams, Halle Barry, Beyonce, Rihanna and many more were able to get a strong foothold in the entertainment business, light skin-did males were quite scarce indeed back in the day.  Motown gave us green-eyed bandit Smokey Robinson and, later, that good looking light-skinned dude in the O’Jays who was always strategically positioned front and center on their record covers; smack dab in the middle of the dark chocolate-covered Eddie Levert and Walter Williams—the two dudes who actually sang lead on all of their hits.

And there was the Michael Evans character on “Good Times” and George Jefferson was pretty high yella.  In the 80s, we had Prince (and all of his racially ambiguous acolytes) and Phillip Michael Thomas.  We briefly embraced uni-eyebrow heartthrob Al B. Sure! and, to a far lesser extent, one-hit wonders Gregory Abbott and Christopher Williams.  But we never took them too seriously, now did we?  Most of the television stars of the 70s and 80s we took seriously, like Arnold and Willis Jackson, James and Florida Evans, Benson, Weezy Jefferson and Mr. T. were robust Blacks. 

Even in the early 90s, it seemed like we preferred Taye Diggs over Shemar Moore, Blair Underwood over Cuba Gooding Jr., D’Angelo over Justin Timberlake. (Wait. Is Timberlake Black? IDK, but he sure acted like it for a minute there.).

But then something changed over in the late 90s, early 2000s or so when genetically mixed-up brothers like Vin Diesel, Maxwell, The Rock and Derek Jeter had both Black and white fans fanning themselves in their presence, paving the way for the dominance of The Racially Vague, like Bruno Mars (Wait. Is Bruno black? Hard to tell.), Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, and annoying mulattos like Chris Brown and John Legend, to achieve international stardom.  Though their level of acceptance had grown among the all-important white media and middle-class purchasers of products, some of them still created a sense of inexplicable backlash in the Black community, especially men.  I feel like things never really clicked between the Black audiences and fair-skin-did actors like Jessie Smollett, Cuba Gooding Jr., Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams and others.  Not even Barack Obama could convince us to take the Teddy Graham male more seriously, as we ended up preferring the Hershey’s chocolate-kissed Michelle Obama over him in recent years.

Teddy Grahams in Sports

Back in the day, the NFL and the NBA had almost as many niggaz as there are in the Wu-Tang Clan.  Now the leagues more closely resemble chocolate chip cookie dough, all pale brown with some dark chocolate chips sprinkled hither and thither. Are folks like Steph Curry and all them Jalens and Jaydens in the N.B.A. and N.F.L. fucking our country towards a new kind of utopian society marked by racial ambiguity? (Michael Jackson pined for this society but he skipped the fucking part altogether.). Can racial ambiguity squash large sections of racial discrimination?  Maybe, because it’s harder for you to call me a nigger if you’re not even sure I am one in the first place. 

Most Teddy Grahams in sports come across as innocuous and harmless; dudes like Devin Booker, Tim Duncan and pre-Oxycontin Tiger Woods you’d have no problem with your daughter dating.  But this came post-1990s, which saw the emergence of a few more dangerous and aggressive models of the light skinned, led by the hamburger buns-lipped Charles Barkley, who proclaimed himself the anti-role model, the wedding-gown donning Dennis Rodman and the tremendously photogenic Allen Iverson with his cornrows and sagging urban attire. Before Colin Kaepernick and social media, there was Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (formally the cherub-faced Chris Jackson) who, like Kaepernick almost two decades later, was ostracized, blackballed, threatened, shut out, discarded and blacklisted (among others) for first refusing to stand for the National Anthem and then completely shunned and repudiated by fans, the N.B.A. and the media alike for holding his cupped hands before his bowed head in a traditional Muslim prayer during said anthem.  The KKK burned down his family home in Mississippi. (Note: A few days after writing this in January of 2024, I found out that Showtime finally did a comprehensive and much-deserved documentary on Abdul-Rauf called “Stand”.)

Stay tuned for Teddy Grahams, Part II…