“Of her family, she says, “The environment that I was in - they’ll be mad at me, but it’s the truth - they were angry, hateful, jealous, ignorant, prideful people. My aunts were very, very mean people. I didn’t want to be like that.”
“She was told by one of these mean aunts, she says, that she’d never finish high school, and she didn’t. Any sign of ambition was stamped on, not just by her family but by the wider community. “You couldn’t stand out because you would have to fight - people would get mad at you. Even if we weren’t sticking ourselves out, even if we were just leading a regular life and trying to be happy and trying to be cute, we would have problems.”
On being a brown-skinned woman in the music business: “The blacker you are, the worse it is for you. If you’re mixed, you’ve got a shot. If you cater to what white America wants you to do and how they want you to look, you can survive. But if you want to be yourself, and try to do things that fit you, and your skin, nobody cares about that. At the end of the day, white America dominates and rules. And it’s racist.”
TheStateOf . . . Mary J. I haven’t been as into Mary as most people. She’s cool, but not “the stuff” to me. (I know some will consider that blasphemy.) Maybe it’s the whole “crackhead” look. Still, this is an interesting interview, and the story of her family life is instructional for anybody who has to deal with the crabs in the bucket. Shake the haters off.
Filed under: Uncategorized
