black! That’s right, several friends and family members over the past couple days have expressed surprise to learn, not that Bradley is dead, but that he was black! Apparently they only figured it out on hearing it mentioned during all the memorials. I asked, and they all said that yes, they had seen him many times on 60 Minutes (and could describe him as the guy with the beard and the earring), but that they simply thought he was white.
I was very surprised by this. Yes, he’s very lite skinned, and for all I know he may have been biracial (no mention of it in his Wikipedia entry), but unfortunately the norm in the US is that the “one-drop rule” still lumps anyone with evident African ancestry as black, and to me he clearly seemed to qualify in that regard. So – was anyone else here surprised to learn that Bradley was African-American?
I have seen some very tanned people who looked not unlike a black person. But the thing that gives it away is usually the hair/skintone combo, and Ed Bradley fit into that department from my observations.
Not that I saw him much, only in occasional international segments we got on our version of 60 Minutes.
Colorblind in that sense means just not being prejudiced or having stereotypes when you see people of different races, to me at least. It doesn’t literally mean not noticing the race of someone you have seen on TV many times over the years. You can give me the most non-prejudiced person in the world, and I wouldn’t believe them if they told me they never noticed that Oprah Winfrey was black.
Not surprised now…but I was a bit confused when he first started on the show. It took me a while to realize he was black…poor reception on the crappy TV and all. I will also admit to not knowing that the current mayor of Cleveland is black, until after his election…have seen him on the news for years, where he was known as a man of few words…he was mostly this guy standing in the background of shots of the more vocal members of City Council.
A lot of people don’t KNOW what Photoshop is. Many folk think Microsoft Photo Editor is all there is, for instance, because they don’t need anything like photoshop or illustrator. It took me a good month to convince a guy I knew that the giant cat was photoshopped.
With that Oprah shot though, its pretty easy to tell that ain’t her body.
In one of the retrospectives I saw, there was an old pictureof him from when he was a disc jockey. He was looking *very * Venus Flytrap.
I’m astounded that anyone over the age of, say, 20 wouldn’t know he was black. Maybe I was an oddball, but I loved “60 Minutes” when I was a kid. Still do.
I will admit to being well over the age of 20, fairly culturally aware, and not having a clue that Ed Bradley was black. ::shrug:: I was not a regular viewer of 60 minutes, but as in the OP I knew who he was and could describe him.
