Brandy released a video featuring her new single, “All I Need,” and…whoa!

This is an interesting interaction for several reasons. First, that a black woman is singing to and about a white man she is in a serious relationship with. The second is that said man is not some John B wanna-be, and appears to just be a regular guy. Tall…kinda cute, but regular.

This is a significant development in the evolution of swirling centering around black women. Who remembers having a conversation with a black female friend or relative who said, “If I’m gonna date out of my race, that man needs to look like Brad Pitt 20 years ago.” That’s sort of interesting, because more often than not, the same women who say such things wouldn’t exactly look to be Hollywood-starlet material. What is more, the men who they dated within their race could be unemployed, have multiple children by multiple women, have criminal records and high-school dropouts–but BRAD had to be PERFECT. Excuses can be made for the black man, but the white man must be Brad-Pitt-Millionaire-Jesus.

So many black women feel like they have to apologize for dating and marrying interracially, and often feel like they need to display obvious reasons why they chose the non-black men they did. Being just “a regular white guy” is often to the scrutinizers insufficient excuse for not “keeping it in the family.” So it’s nice to see Brandy deciding that a “regular guy” is all she needs–at least in this video.

However…

There are some subtle messages I find troubling in this video clip. Brandy is wearing a suit, and the object of her affection is holding a bouquet of flowers. Wait a minute…

Here we go AGAIN depicting black women as masculine, and unworthy of being pursued. I’m going to need the producers of these types of videos to do exponentially better.

 

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#AlliNeed available on iTunes….. link in my bio⭐️ @staronfox thank you for this amazing moment. Hey @chadmichaelmurray ?#CassiewithALittleBrandyOnTop

A post shared by ? b r a n d y ? (@4everbrandy) on Nov 12, 2018 at 5:26pm PST