You said: “This situation contains multitudes. Which is why I have argued there needs to be some distinction made between who exactly enjoys the privelege, because it is not just "white people" in general or "light skin" There are many levels.”

Why don’t you write about the intricacies for us to comment on? I know many other levels came up on this board, but you can start a thread giving your own views on how it works.

However, what some want to make us feel is that it is not a legitimate issue to discuss, and the light-skinned ones want to tell informed-dark-skinned-kinky-hair-Black-Africans how they should speak on this issues that we are most sensitive to.

To add insult to injury some (including a few who we recent discovered were white or look near white) even go so far as to try to play down the effect of this on the Blacker ones with platitudes to the effect of, "Can't we all just get along". Those types of replies are not discussing it, those comments are an attempt to placate or shelter the issue.

There are others who feel they can dictate to obviously informed-dark-skinned-kinky-hair-Black-Africans about how they must conduct themselves over these issues that they never wanted discussed in the first place. I say no to that also, in the same manner that they would not allow whites do dictate the terms and conditions over racism discussions.

So it is not that people are simply talking over each other's head but there is down right dishonesty taking place. There is a wealth of information on it on the Internet. The problem with discussing this over the Internet is the amount of fear/‘fair-skinned ones who are hurry to sell us that they are the exception to the rule as if they can be any such exceptions. Then there are others who pretend they are Black for the sole purpose of distracting from the issues and directing the reasoning to personal attacks on who brought it up.

The point is this, in a westernized society, (((once you are white or near white you get automatic privileges based on the color of your skin))). There is no exception to this rule once we are addressing racism and colorism. It matters little that some claim they refuse such privileges, which in itself is another privilege, as dark-skinned-kinky-hair-Black-Africans have no such privilege to refuse.

Now if this point is not understood and ones seek to introduce other types of class divisions and ethnic biases, then they are simply either deliberately distracting or are genuinely mis/uninformed.