….I actually didn't realize this wasn't common knowledge in the majority culture. My family might joke about an "English sea captain" being the reason that one branch of my family is very light, but we all know the actual reason. That's not even going into the issue of the brown paper bag test, and how lots of…

This fear is very real. It's not so much that you'll get killed, but that you can very easily get caught in a bad "he-said-she-said" situation. At least that's what it is in my case.

I was afraid they were going to walk away from the topic, and make it into Bow realizing that she was just uncomfortable with her son dating anyone. That would have been the traditional sitcom out in the 90s ("it wasn't really about race, it was about motherhood!") but because this show is evolved, they didn't back…

….do we? I pretty much have a blank spot after Ulysses S. Grant to Teddy Roosevelt.

Learning about Quakers is what put me on the path of not being religious (though it was a very long path with stops in Christian Gnosticism and the Bahai World Faith), though I still think they have a very admirable views from everything I've read.

It's a long story. Essentially, I'm very much into the ritual of religion (Christianity specifically). I insisted we have our wedding in a church (she was content to have one on a beach) and tend towards the traditional. Problem is, on a theological level I don't believe any of it is anything but metaphorically…

I'd sincerely hoped that we'd avoid a redux of the 1968 election, but it somehow turned out even worse.

Yeah I always thought it was a reference to the Eminem song.

Took me a second to catch the "Native Son" reference!

It's also useful if your wife is a Christian (the good kind, not the "these gay niqqas is a problem" kind), and you're not-religious but that's another story.

That's good, because otherwise you have to stare them deep in the eyes to try and figure out if they voted for Trump. (s/o to Desus Nice for that one).

I went to a Unitarian Church the week after the election in Brooklyn Heights (which is where HRC based her campaign, an extremely rich, extremely white section of Brooklyn). The church was packed with more confused white people than I thought possible, all of them going through various stages of grief about the…

I don't know the way to describe it properly, but a successful black woman like her most likely has a very set image of how she wants her life to go and part of that is having a successful black husband.

It was needlessly blunt, but come on Molly. He still moved stuff around to make sure he could be there, and was perfectly willing to play arm candy to her. Seems like the type of thing you can talk about once you get home.

Noted. Not something I'm going to utter again anytime in the foreseeable future.

Maybe "put her in her place" was a bit too extreme, I don't think it was meant as a power play, just rather that she needs to understand there's a specific way she had to act if she was going to succeed there. However, I guess if I'm looking at it that way, then Molly and the partner were both (in some way) on the…

Good Point, I hadn't fully processed the optics of the female partner bringing in all of the male co-workers to do the talk.

Re: the "Rashida Situation." I think it's interesting that Molly already took the time to try to talk to Rashida, but not for the reason that the partner wanted. Molly was trying to help Rashida navigate through the firm world, while the senior partner wanted Molly to put Rashida in "her place."

I figured he just got depressed, that seemed to be the implication early on (but I could be reading into it).

"On Shade: The Subversiveness of Ellison's Invisible Man" seems like a legit dissertation topic for an English PHD.