I’ve said this before, it’s REALLY nice to hear my ideas coming out of the mouths of other people:

John Legend says its okay to see race (sorry, embed code was refusing to work and I don’t know enough HTML to troubleshoot it).

John Legend is a singer/songwriter who has collaborated often with the likes of Common, Mos Def and Kanye West. He’s also a really smart guy, apparently.

“…I’m black and I love being black, and I don’t want somebody to love me despite the fact that I’m black or be blind to the fact that I’m black and love me; I just want them to love me for whoever I am individually. But it’s okay that you see me as a black guy too.”

He’s absolutely right, incidentally, about how to get racist ideologies out of the public narrative: tear down the stereotypes. Not simply by saying the stereotypes are wrong, but by surrounding people with examples of how they’re wrong.