“This ain’t no time for segregatin’
I’m talking ’bout brown and yellow two
High yellow girl, can’t you tell
You’re just the surface of our dark deep well
If your mind could really see
You’d know your color the same as me…”
We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue is the last track on Side A of Mayfield’s 1970 debut solo album, Curtis. With a title echoing the American constitution, this song serves as a curious articulation of solidarity, of racial triangulation. Mayfield invokes a relationship between Black, Brown, and Yellow racialization, even suggesting a Yellow (Asian American) proximity to Whiteness – but that Asian America cannot truly attain Whiteness, and in fact maintains a struggle closely related to that of Black America. Throughout the song, Mayfield remains hopeful, calling for collective action across people of colour.
With this album created during a time of increased political and specifically racial (turmoil? happening? consciousness?) Mayfield was among the first African-American musicians who openly spoke about social and political issues in their work. Mayfield’s musical and political influence however, extends far beyond his own space and time, and is intimately linked to our course’s considerations.
The song also inspired the title of the paperback edition of Paul Gilroy’s W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures (entitled Darker Than Blue: On The Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture). In this work, Gilroy (author of The Black Atlantic, as invoked in these last few classes) calls for a revitalization of Black Atlantic studies, and reflects on the fading political voice of Black music in America to discuss larger questions of Black intellectualism. In particular, Gilroy looks closely at Mayfield’s influence on his own musical and political formation, and that of artists like Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley across the Black Atlantic.