[BretLudwig]

Return of the New Mulatto Elite


"Awhile back, a British TV talent show was won by a dumpy-looking guy
named Paul Potts who wowed the crowd by singing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma"
aria from Turandot.

Americans don't know anything about opera anymore, so they don't realize
how thrilling it can be. (The British viewers were probably vaguely
familiar with the aria from the connection between soccer and the Three
Tenors, "Nessun Dorma" being more or less Pavarotti's theme song.) So it
was only natural for the American Idol-style show "America's Got Talent"
to have as the anchorman of their season premiere this week an American
contestant singing "Nessun Dorma." Neil E. Boyd, an insurance salesman of
Pavarotti-like girth, floored the audience, making him the frontrunner.

I imagine the producers of the show auditioned a lot of part-time opera
singers to find the one they were going to anoint as the American Paul
Potts. The fellow they came up with, Boyd, is (not too surprisingly) part
black, with a white mom with whom he is very close.

A couple of years ago, my wife predicted early in the American Idol season
that Jordin Sparks, the daughter of an NFL cornerback and a redhead, would
win, since she could sing both black and white.

I think there's a general lesson emerging: whites like blacks, but black
teens these days don't like much of anything they consider white. They
like just hip-hop and basketball (and, okay, football, too). Almost
everything else is considered a violation of keeping it real.

Even though blacks may tend to have a natural advantage at creating
resonant vocal tones, the very idea of singing opera is totally off their
radar. Sure, there were big time black opera singers like Marian Anderson
as far back as between the Wars, but black youths aren't interested in
that kind of acting white anymore.

So, the small number of mulattos who grew up with one non-black parent and
thus get introduced to a wider range of cultural options beyond rap and
hoops are disproportionately taking the plums that people a generation ago
assumed blacks in general would be achieving.

Back in 1968, when the top American rock guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and
top American tennis player was Arthur Ashe, everybody assumed that
integration meant that blacks would continue to show up near the top in an
ever wider variety of fields.

Today, though, superstar rock guitarist Tom Morello is the great-nephew of
Jomo Kenyatta; and the second best American men's tennis player James Blake
has a black father. But they both have white mothers. Similarly, five
different black golfers won 23 PGA tournaments between 1961 and 1986, but
since then Tiger Woods is the only player of any visible fraction of
African ancestry to win a tournament.

There's somebody who's an even better example of this rise of the new
mulatto elite, but I can't quite think of his name at the moment."


http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/r...tto-elite.html

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