u/MacroManJr

First off: I agree with Rachel here.

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Now, my own opinion: Some people chirping that Maya Boyd isn't "dark enough" to play Storm are missing a few things.

I get where the concern comes from and know.tje colorism issue well (see my addendum comment below), but I think the conversation is missing the bigger picture.

The first thing I keep wondering here during the video is...what exactly counts as "dark enough"?

Some people talk like Black Africans all come in one shade of dark. They don't.

Africa is the most genetically diverse continent on Earth. There are natural ranges of skin tones across Black African populations that existed long before Arabs or Europeans ever showed up.

The Khoisan, who are among the oldest continuous Black populations on the continent, get mistaken for being mixed all the time because people underestimate just how much diversity already existed there.

And Storm isn't just Kenyan in her biography. Her dad is Black American. And like most Black American, we're a mixed bag of DNA.

Black African/Black American mixes don't always turn out with some hued like Wesley Snipes. Actress Tiffany Haddish is just about the same skin tone as Maya Boyd and she's Eritrean and Black American. It happens.

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But even if we somehow settled what "dark enough" means...then what?

We're still arguing inside somebody else's story.

And that's the part I actually care about.

Whose Black character is Storm, anyway?

Because I wish we'd stop making characters created by white people carry so much of our need for Black representation.

Now, don't get me wrong—I love X-Men. Storm is my wife from an illustrated life. And I'm not against better representation in Hollywood. Far from it.

I'm just tired of acting like white-created institutions and white-created characters are the measuring stick for Black excellence.

Because underneath it all, the message starts sounding like Black excellence is just white excellence with darker skin.

Think about it: As beloved as Storm is and should be...we're still using somebody else's imagination as the place where we go looking for ourselves.

The truth is, we didn't create Storm.

Dave Cockrum did. He pieced her together from two earlier character concepts he already had, back when amalgamation was the norm of comic character creation.

She wasn't originally imagined as this grand statement about Black womanhood. She became all that because our people connected with her.

That's a different thing.

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And here's another reason I don't think this argument ever really lands.

Let's say they do cast someone darker.

Okay...then what?

What if she's an African actress or Nigerian-British actress instead of Black American? Now, we're arguing about diaspora (despite Storm literally being both African and Black American).

What if she doesn't fit Storm's comic-book beauty? Now we're arguing about beauty standards.

What if her BMI is built differently than the comics? That's another conversation.

The goalposts just keep moving.

That's not because colorism isn't real. It absolutely is. Diaspora politics are real. Beauty standards are real.

But Storm's casting can't solve all those conversations at once.

And honestly, I don't think that's fair to ask of any actress.

(Frankly, this shows another issue: why women—especially Black—just can't win, no matter what they do...but that's subject for another day.)

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One of the biggest things colorism taught me is that there really isn't an "enough."

For Black people, our skin shades become a stand-in for everything else we're actually arguing about—identity, beauty, authenticity, origin, status.

Nobody chose the skin tone they were born with.

Especially as Black people with histories as complicated as ours, none of us decided where we'd land on the color spectrum.

What we can choose is how we treat each other because of it.

And I think that's where the real trap is.

We spend all this time arguing over who gets to wear a costume we didn't design instead of putting that same energy into creating characters that are actually ours from the very beginning.

That's where my passion is.

I'm honestly less interested in who gets cast as Storm than I am in seeing more Black writers, Black artists, Black directors, and Black creators making original characters of our own.

Because when we create them ourselves, nobody has to argue afterward whether they're Black enough.

They already belong to us.

As a Black American, I'll never forgive progressives for hijacking the word "woke" and stripping it of its actual meaning.

"Woke" didn't come out of partisan politics. It came out of Black American history—our church tradition of vigilance and generations of "stay woke" as survival language. It was about remaining alert to danger and injustice without compromise, not branding an entire political agenda.

Much of our cultural inheritance is a collection of survival messages passed down from one generation to the next. 'Stay woke' was one of the most important.

But then, in recent years, parts of the political left turned it into a catch-all label for every progressive cause. After that, the political right turned that new definition into a caricature they could attack. Between both sides, the original meaning was buried.

"Woke" was never a synonym for women's rights, LGBTQ+ issues, immigration, universal healthcare, or every other issue people now lump under it. And, sorry, Abigail Disney and Jane Fonda: no, "woke" doesn't mean that you just care about other people.

Those are all separate conversations with their own separate contexts. Black Americans have been saying this for years, but too often people borrow our language without listening to us explain it.

That's the part that stings the most. People will gladly adopt pieces of Black American culture, but ignore Black American voices.

In this regard, the whole gamut of American politics should be ashamed. A word that belonged to slave-descended Black Americans as Black dialogue became ammunition in everyone else's political war.

This is why people outside Black American society should leave our vernacular alone. Our culture isn't the public domain for the next viral slogan. We're not America's subsidiaries.

At this point, I honestly don't know who's done more damage: the right, which openly attacks us, or the left, which claims to champion us while repurposing our language and treating our community like a dependable voting bloc, even as many of our longstanding needs remain unresolved.

It's also why many Black Americans (at least, many that I know) aren't exactly rushing toward organizations like the DSA. A lot of that politics speaks more directly to other constituencies (especially on immigration issues) while still borrowing Black rhetoric to sell it. That leaves many of us feeling spoken for rather than listened to.

We'll stand against Trumpism and political extremism because we understand the stakes. But our general loyalty isn't particularly to Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, moderates, or progressives. Too many "sides" have failed us.

(At least, speaking for myself.)

So, we're going to remain on what "stay woke" always meant: stay alert, watch your back, and look out for one another, Black America.

For Black America, those words were never a trend. They were—and still are—a survival ethic.

I'm sick of Donald Trump. Let's get that out of the way first. Believe me—I eagerly await his obituary, too. But I'm making a point.

And, yes, this post is relevant to r/BlackPeople. Bear with me.

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CBS' Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang's big line at the WHCA dinner was "my dad came to the U.S. as a student with just $67 in his pocket."

Cue the swelling music. ...Except we've been hearing that exact preamble since the 1880s.

Millions of families have a version of it. It was old when our grandparents were born. It's not moving anymore. It's the trope of tropes now. Everyone in that room has heard it a thousand times before.

Even Trump's own rotten family had one. You've heard it by now: His grandfather Friedrich fled Germany at 16 to dodge the draft, apprenticed as a barber in Manhattan, got banished from Germany for bailing on them, then made his future-fortune money running restaurants and sleazy brothels for miners during the Klondike gold rush.

Broke young immigrant, hustles his way up by any means necessary, attains generational wealth. Similar shape as Jiang's story. Except one gets called "the American Dream" and the other is probably proof that grifting might be genetic.

Still, they're both the "rags-to-riches, only in America" routine.

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Here's what matters: Jiang's dad wasn't some guy who washed ashore with nothing, perhaps fleeing a war-torn country. He came over on a grad school scholarship to WVU. He understood that his family could make a life here.

So, that's not exactly a suitcase and a prayer. He was an educated, selected, credentialed immigrant from China, funded with an academic fast track.

It's exactly the kind of brain-drain pipeline the U.S. has been recruiting on purpose since 1965, when the old quota system got torn down and skilled-visa categories started paving the way for what became H-1B—the same pipeline that gets weaponized as a "why can't you" cudgel against Black Americans.

Again, that's not a coin flip or a "only a pocketful of dreams" origin story. That's just the post-Hart-Celler-Act system working exactly as designed.

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So, when the family lands in Buckhannon, WV—a town of about 5,000 people where they were then the only Chinese-American residents—and opens the town's first Chinese restaurant, that's not some underdog story.

Her family arrived with a graduate degree already in motion, landing in a country that had already spent two decades building "hardworking, from-the-ground-up immigrant" pipelines into the model-minority story America still tells itself.

Was it isolating as the only Asian kid in a small Appalachian town? Probably. Did her family probably encounter some nonsense from hillbilly knuckleheads? Probably.

But was her path already structurally in place? It was one of the more paved roads in the whole country at that point.

Compare it to an oppressed Black family in a historically redlined block, or even a poor white rural family two counties over in coal-mining country. (There, rednecks. I threw you a bone, for once.)

No front door built for them. Some got the door built specifically to keep them out—often by successful people who, too, carry their own "suitcase-immigrant" tale.

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So, her origin story runs on rails. And her biography does too:

Liberal arts degree, a teacher who spotted her at 13, journalism internship, grad school, local news, national beat, an Emmy, marries a future Yelp exec she met in college, two kids, book deal, podium at a black-tie dinner delivering the closing argument for the genre.

None of that means she didn't work for it. Most successful people, despite their advantages, still typically worked for what they get.

It just means every rung of her ladder had already been reinforced by policy and decades of precedent before she ever climbed on. That's no shade at her success. It's just not a story that needs a microphone anymore.

...And then she topped the opening line off with a corny "6-7" joke. Ugh, please don't.

And that's another fatigue: no matter how foreign-born or successful someone is, everyone eventually borrows a cup of conventionalized Black culture to season themselves with.

For once, I don't blame Trump for falling asleep, completely disinterested. I would've, too.

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Here's my actual point: I'm not dragging Weijia Jiang or her success specifically. Or her family story.

I'm highlighting the banality of the same old immigrant-success stories that get treated like proof the system's fair and America is a land of dreams where anyone can do it with enough grit and life is beautiful here.

(And I don't think Weijia meant it this way. She's just doing the "American Dream" routine that's become old hat but now it's her 15 seconds of stage time. Also while probably bringing a bit of shade against anti-immigration Trump himself.)

But an immigrant making it was never proof the system is fair. Or that America is truly a land of opportunity for all. It's proof that for this particular door, the system was built to let certain people through and reward them once they did.

For the families—like Black Americans—that never got a front door built for them at all, the ones who built half this country's infrastructure and fought its wars and still hit walls generations later, we don't get a podium at a black-tie dinner to tell that story.

Because our story doesn't flatter anybody in the room. Our origin stories always feel like shade thrown at everyone else.

But everyone would still yawn at and ignore ours because nobody can truly relate. 😒

CNN ran a "priced out of her neighborhood" segment on Chosewood Park in Atlanta. Here's the bigger story it buried.

The woman in the piece, Mayra Martinez, 23, was born and raised in Chosewood Park. Her immigrant parents settled there, and she says she started noticing neighbors leaving around 2017.

So, this isn't a family that just showed up. But it's also not a family with deep roots in the neighborhood's actual history. Chosewood Park dates to 1910—it says so right on the sign in CNN's own footage. There's history here long before anyone can claim to have "built" this place.

As segregation shaped where Black Atlantans could live, families settled into neighborhoods like this one, and by the 1960s and '70s it was predominantly Black.

Like a lot of Black Atlanta neighborhoods, it also got hit by discriminatory lending. The AJC's 1988 "Color of Money" investigation documented banks denying loans to Southside neighborhoods for years, driving decline despite residents investing in their own community.

Mayra's family shows up in the 2000s. One generation deep. The neighborhood's roots go back five generations. That gap doesn't close just because she grew up there.

CNN whiffs the real story. It's not "affluent outsiders vs. the family that built this place." It's a pattern running for two decades, mostly undiscussed:

The post-2000 wave of migration into the South (Latino, Asian, white transplants—all of it) drove the land rush squeezing multigenerational Georgians, including the Black families whose ancestors actually built neighborhoods like this one.

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For the record: I'm a Black Georgia native, born and raised. Family's been here since before the Civil War, for obvious reasons. My own lifespan is longer than Mayra's family's entire American story. This one felt personal.

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But here's the bigger deal: it's not just Atlanta, and it's not just white money.

Middle-class Hispanic communities have been part of gentrifying historically Black American neighborhoods in cities across the country for years: parts of LA, sections of New York, Miami, Texas, and beyond.

It's a documented pattern. It just doesn't get talked about, because "people of color" gets used as a blanket shield, as if displacement stops being displacement depending on who's doing it.

An immigrant family moving into a historically Black neighborhood, then later feeling squeezed by the next wave behind them, is still part of the same mechanism that hollowed out the original community.

Doesn't matter that they're not "white." Doesn't matter that they're feeling pressure now, too. It's ironic that someone whose own arrival is the tail end of that exact process ends up as the face of a story about it.

And none of this means Mayra's family isn't under real financial strain—they clearly are. It just means CNN told a one-generation displacement story inside a much older, much less discussed one, but never connected the two.

And who can outright blame CNN, either? There's been an eager and obvious push by broadcast media, social media, entertainment, advertising, and politics to bill the incoming demographics as the new prominent faces of "minorityhood."

Guess they're tired of us "store-brand" minorities.

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Bottom line: gentrification of Black America isn't a white-affluence-only phenomenon anymore. Pretending otherwise, just because the newer arrivals are also a minority group, keeps the truer pattern unexamined, and the truer people who should be telling this story pushed to the back of it.