Prior Pryor
August 24, 2008 9:58 AM Subscribe
What is the Richard Pryor quote about everybody screwing each other till we're all the same shade of light brown?
Maybe Russell Peters or recently Dave Chappelle?
posted by suedehead at 1:35 PM on August 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by suedehead at 1:35 PM on August 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
I heard this quote attributed to Lyndon Johnson (a slip, as he thought the mike was off, or something like that) but have no reference for that.
posted by Rumple at 6:10 PM on August 24, 2008
posted by Rumple at 6:10 PM on August 24, 2008
This idea was around enough in the 70s that it might've been considered just cultural currency. I know it was floating around in hippie circles as a serious idea -- the idea that the ideal Solution to racism was as much mixing as possible so our "differences would just be erased." Seems naive and simplistic now. But a sweet impulse.
posted by kalapierson at 6:39 PM on August 24, 2008
posted by kalapierson at 6:39 PM on August 24, 2008
In Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, "the author implies that the cure for American racial troubles is the creation of an ivory-colored humanity for which difference and otherness is a thing of a primitive genetic past. In that novel, racial prejudice ceases to exist on earth because humanity is moving to the point at which 'we're all the same shade of off-white'". [GBooks source]
I'm not sure where Sir Arthur got the idea that off-white was anywhere near the median. It was not much later that TIME was predicted that even America would end up sort of ... cocoa.
Other than that, I can't find anything definitive before Bulworth. The idea may have been there, just not that particular expression.
posted by dhartung at 9:31 PM on August 24, 2008
I'm not sure where Sir Arthur got the idea that off-white was anywhere near the median. It was not much later that TIME was predicted that even America would end up sort of ... cocoa.
Other than that, I can't find anything definitive before Bulworth. The idea may have been there, just not that particular expression.
posted by dhartung at 9:31 PM on August 24, 2008
I could have sworn in his Sunset Strip show he said that "everybody needs to keep fucking everybody until we all look the same," but trying to find that part of the show on YouTube seems to suggest that I misremembered.
posted by paisley henosis at 10:13 PM on August 24, 2008
posted by paisley henosis at 10:13 PM on August 24, 2008
Reminds me of these Woody Guthrie lyrics set to music by Billy Bragg as part of the song "She Came Along To Me":
And all creeds and kinds and colors
of us are blending
Till I suppose ten million years from now
we'll all be just alike
Same color, same size, working together
And maybe we'll have all of the fascists
out of the way by then.
posted by nonane at 1:53 PM on August 25, 2008
And all creeds and kinds and colors
of us are blending
Till I suppose ten million years from now
we'll all be just alike
Same color, same size, working together
And maybe we'll have all of the fascists
out of the way by then.
posted by nonane at 1:53 PM on August 25, 2008
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Knappster at 11:04 AM on August 24, 2008