{"id":22634,"date":"2017-06-14T07:00:09","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22634"},"modified":"2020-08-20T07:58:02","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T11:58:02","slug":"obviously-its-gonna-be-them-light-skins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/06\/14\/obviously-its-gonna-be-them-light-skins\/","title":{"rendered":"“Obviously, it’s gonna be them light skins”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A mere 2 minutes and 19 seconds in length, the video Are Black British Youth Obsessed with Light Skin\/Curly Hair. Or is it just Preference?\u201d is a compilation of snippets from \u201cperson on the street\u201d interviews, conducted in the environs of two shopping centers and a commuter railway station in east London (more on this later).<\/p>\n

The interviewer is a roving Internet reporter going by the handle of VanBanter, whose YouTube channel boasts over 85,000 subscribers.\u00a0 VanBanter is a tall, svelte, black Briton of around 16, himself light skinned, whose voluminous hair in the clips is either styled in cornrows, or pulled back in a low Afro puff, the black version of the \u201cman bun.\u201d<\/p>\n

The interviewees are black boys, ostensibly between the ages of 12 and 17, of a wide spectrum of skin colors and hair textures. \u00a0The single question VanBanter asks all of them is, \u201cWhat kind of girls are you into?\u201d\u00a0 On occasion, he phrases it as, \u201cWhat type of girls do you slide into?\u201d\u00a0 Two token girls are asked the same question about boys.\u00a0 All interviewed say they like \u201clight skins.\u201d\u00a0 Some add \u201ccurly hair,\u201d clearly meant as a qualifier in opposition to \u201ckinky,\u201d not straight, hair texture. Hence, palpably, one can infer that light-skins are more favoured than any other colors at the place. Most of the interviewees are filmed standing in pairs or small groups of friends who support their responses with interjections, gestures, or general glee.<\/p>\n

The video was first uploaded on June 1st<\/sup> to the Facebook page of Black British Banter.\u00a0 Over that weekend, it received a million views, over 6k likes (2.6k neutral thumbs-up expressing interest, 1.2k crying emojis, 1.1k angry ones, 546 laughing ones, 467 wows, and 62 loves), 5k comments, and 8,000 shares.<\/p>\n

I myself could not stop viewing it.\u00a0 The comments far outstretch the bounds of personal preference, to which we all have an undisputable right.\u00a0 Instead, they defend a centuries-old global regime of negating not only the beauty, but very humanity, of people with dark skin, especially women. \u00a0\u201cNo black t\u2019ings<\/em>, like my shoes n\u2019 shit!\u201d says one very dark-skinned boy, luminous in red track suit and fresh fade<\/a>. \u201cLight skins, always light skins, man,\u201d says another boy hubristically, he himself light of complexion.\u00a0 Surprisingly, his mate, a much darker boy, steps forward into the frame of the shot to pat him approvingly on the shoulder, then retreats with a satisfied smirk on his face. \u201cAll o\u2019 dem!\u201d responds a third speaker, who looks to be around age twelve.\u00a0 Goaded on by his surrounding posse of friends, the boy continues.\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cCurly\u201d \u2013 which he pronounces \u201cqueely\u201d \u2013 \u201chair, light skin, all o\u2019 dem.\u00a0 No dark skins, no dark skins!\u201d<\/p>\n

I must have replayed this entire video twenty times or more.\u00a0 Each time, something new shot forth to astonish, inform, infuriate, dismay, perplex, even amuse and impress, but, regrettably, raise little hope in me from the mouths of this Black British youth, minors, all of them.<\/p>\n

Impressive is the boy who is the companion of the one who says he keeps his shoes and his women separate.\u00a0 Addressing the camera directly, he lyrically traverses two or more generations and thousands of geographic miles in just one comment.\u00a0 He starts out delivering his reply in a vernacular London tongue, not quite Cockney, but close to it, dropping his t\u2019s and adding the emphatic \u201cyeah\u201d at the end of his sentence: \u201cLight skin, big back, big ti\u2019i, yeah<\/em>\u201d (\u201cLight skin, big behind, big titties.\u201d).\u00a0 He then deftly code switches to Jamaican-inflected patois, eliding the \u201cnt\u201d in the word \u201cwant\u201d with a subtle exhalation, and substituting, as in most Caribbean creole languages, \u201cto\u201d with \u201cfor\u201d: \u201cWah fi tek wood. Dem gyal deh<\/em>.\u201d (\u201cWant [or, it might be one] to take wood. Those kind of girls.\u201d Wood is penis). \u00a0All this he delivers with an emcee\u2019s flow, synching his posture and hand gestures to his speech.\u00a0 Beautiful in sound and adept in motion! His is the most performative delivery of a speech pattern that all the youth, the interviewer included, communicate in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

London Multicultural English, or MLE, as it has come to be termed, is a patchwork of vocabulary, syntax, and inflections woven together from a multitude of language families transported to London by regional and international migrants over the course of centuries.\u00a0 In years closest to ours, the dialect\u2019s four decided grandparents are Cockney English, Caribbean creole or patois, languages from former British colonies in, chiefly, the Indian Subcontinent and West Africa, and \u201clearner varieties,\u201d the in-between states of fluency formed during any process of second-language acquisition.\u00a0 If you listen closely to this crowd of youngsters, you\u2019ll hear from the Cockney grandparent a lot of \u201cinnit,\u201d \u201cknow wha\u2019 ah mean?\u201d and elisions of the double \u201ct\u201d in words like \u201cbutter.\u201d\u00a0 From the Caribbean forebear comes the pronunciation of \u201cthem\u201d and \u201cthat\u201d as \u201cdem\u201d and \u201cdat,\u201d the erasure of the final \u201cg\u201d in gerund words (\u201ccleaning\u201d becomes \u201ccleanin\u201d), and the practice of teeth sucking, a catch-all method of dismissing or objecting to a circumstance or expressed opinion, used throughout the African diaspora, as well as it\u2019s onomatopoeic cousin, the short non-word \u201cChuh!\u201d, which is more specific to the Anglophone Caribbean.\u00a0 There is also a cousin once-removed, Hip Hop Nation Language, hailing from African America.<\/p>\n

When I watch and listen to these kids, I think to myself, thence came Grime music and a host of art forms, past and current, that have infused British popular culture.\u00a0 But, then, the horrifying thoughts crowd in.\u00a0 What are the stakes of social mobility and political inclusion for kids like these whose mother tongue is MLE? Is London, or all of Britain, hurtling towards the same trials and tribulations vis-\u00e0-vis the state and public education that the U.S.A. has faced with Ebonics?\u00a0 And, is that deft youth\u2019s flow the spontaneous rehearsal of some other boy\u2019s or man\u2019s rhyme he\u2019s heard elsewhere, maybe on somebody\u2019s Grime track.\u00a0 Worse yet, given its noxious sentiments, is it part of a rhyme scheme he\u2019s producing for mass consumption?\u00a0 Either way, the thoughts he poeticizes can and do travel through popular music, literally becoming soundtracks to these young people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

My generation inherited and in turn passed down a fair share of those soundtracks.\u00a0 Remember Buju Banton\u2019s \u201cLove me Browning\u201d from 1992?\u00a0 The refrain went, \u201cMe love me car, me love me bike, me love me money and t\u2019ing.\u00a0 But most of all, me love me browning<\/em>\u201d \u2013 his light-skinned girlfriend.\u00a0 The song topped the charts in Jamaica and was appreciated worldwide by enthusiasts of Jamaican dancehall music, which basically means the Jamaican and pan-Caribbean diaspora. I couldn\u2019t help but get an echo of Banton when I heard one of the interviewees say, \u201cI like my light skins.\u201d This is an intergenerational playback loop.\u00a0 In 1994, the Notorious B.I.G., one of the most heroicized martyrs of the U.S. Hip Hop Nation, born Christopher Wallace in 1972 in Brooklyn to Jamaican parents, released the track, \u201cOne More Chance,\u201d whose opening rhyme goes as follows,<\/p>\n

\n

First things first: I, Poppa, freaks all the honeys<\/em><\/p>\n

Dummies, Playboy bunnies, those wanting money<\/em><\/p>\n

Those the ones I like \u2018cause they don’t get Nathan, but penetration<\/em><\/p>\n

Unless it smells like sanitation<\/em><\/p>\n

Gar-bage, I turn like doorknawbs<\/em><\/p>\n

Heartthrob never, Black and ugly as ever<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Notorious B.I.G. was describing himself.\u00a0 Or, more accurately, women\u2019s reactions to him.\u00a0 For years, I have used this track in one of my classes in media studies to trace the history of sampling, configured as it has been by discographic nostalgia in the creative imaginations of the artists.\u00a0 \u201cOne More Chance\u201d is one of a whopping twenty-six tracks produced by different artists between 1991 and 2011 that have sampled various elements of the same song, \u201cStay with Me,\u201d by the 1980s RnB group Debarge.\u00a0 Every time the part in my lecture comes where I play Biggie\u2019s installment, I nervously hold my finger above the space bar to avoid playing that \u201cblack and ugly as ever\u201d line to my students, who are predominantly young people of color.\u00a0 Yes, they, unlike the youngsters discussed here, are legal adults, and have not only heard the line times immemorial \u2013 Biggie is a music icon for the ages \u2013 but had more life experience to process its message.\u00a0 But, how many times do they have to hear it, even in an institutional setting of higher learning, before it becomes taken-for-granted common sense, before we can all agree to delete it from our ideological playlist?\u00a0 The \u201cAre Black British Youth Obsessed with Light Skin\/Curly Hair. Or is it just a preference?\u201d video could, it strikes me now, help suppress my trigger-finger anxiety.\u00a0 It\u2019s a great tool to use to reflect, in any arena, on how not only rhymes and rhythms, but attitudes, get sampled through time and space.\u00a0 This, I believe, was its creator\u2019s main intention, given his choice to make the final voice in his editing of the video that of a dark-skinned boy with a relaxed stance who says, \u201cnot ligh\u2019ies, not lig\u2019ies<\/em>.\u201d \u00a0This is not to praise the speaker for simply inverting the hierarchical order of skin-tone preference, for that would be equally unsatisfying, if indeed that\u2019s what he does.\u00a0 We do not, in fact, hear him express an adoration for dark-skinned girls.\u00a0 It\u2019s his self-possession in assuming a position contrary to the one solidly occupied by all the speakers who came before him that is significant. \u00a0I remember back when Bobby Brown cast as lead actress in his video for the song \u201cEvery Little Step\u201d a dark-skinned model, the one who leads the posse of much lighter-complected beauties and gets Bobby in a bathtub in the end. It was actually a point of discussion among my friends because this was so uncommon in the casting of video vixens.<\/p>\n

Further along in the video, we encounter a boy in his later adolescence, perhaps 17, with a medium-brown complexion and tight cornrows.\u00a0 \u201cObviously, it\u2019s gonna be them light skins, they know how to\u2026\u201d he begins by saying.\u00a0 The video cuts to him attempting to clarify his statement by outlining a tension he has observed between pursuer and pursued in this color-coded game.\u00a0 His is analysis missing from all the other speakers, and if there is a modicum of hopefulness to be found in this video that all these boys will in time mature into reflective men, here\u2019s where it lingers.\u00a0 \u201cDhy-dhy-dhey\u2019re stressful,\u201d he stutters out about light-skinned girls.\u00a0 \u201cBut, they\u2019re confident.\u201d With this, he turns his palms to the camera, as if to say, in resignation, \u201cthat\u2019s just the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Is it any wonder this pre-adult perceives \u201cthem\u201d as stressful and possessed of a confidence level that rises to threatening, given the cultural feedback loop that plays and replays, mixes, remixes, and mashes up the message his peers, all barely on either side of puberty\u2019s threshold, are parroting? \u00a0It\u2019s not just the pervasive degradation of dark-skinned femininity that these comments reinscribe, although that is nuff<\/em> damage.\u00a0 It is the way in which they mark out positions in a gender war where female agency gets reduced to skin color (the lead signifier in an armament of preferred traits), and male potency (laying \u201cwood\u201d the chief maneuver) to the measure of one\u2019s ability to circumscribe that agency, make it work for you.\u00a0 The speaker\u2019s halting pronouncement shows that this world of meaning he helps stabilize with his own words he does not inhabit with ease.\u00a0 It is a world that will not always yield to him, may often be outright cruel, and it does so in accordance with the terms he himself has set.\u00a0 Anyone who has watched even one episode of the reality television series, Basketball Wives, or She\u2019s got Game, and taken note of how the female cast looks, and what the male storylines consist of, will taste a kernel of the speaker\u2019s despair over his prospects for a fulfilling relationship.<\/p>\n

I said there are two female interviewees.\u00a0 One is a pretty, pretty, pretty girl, who is bubbly and holds one hand up to her face as she takes in VanBanter\u2019s question, \u201cWhat kind of boys are you into?\u201d\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t skip a beat in responding, smiling sweetly.\u00a0 However, her answer is so very troubling, given that this sweetheart, who cannot be older than 14, has a deep dark-brown complexion.\u00a0 \u201cLight skins have long hair,\u201d she says.\u00a0 Now, here\u2019s what I hear:\u00a0 this girl is so conditioned to follow \u201clight skin\u201d with \u201clong hair\u201d as a possession that she doesn\u2019t even edit the mantra to more accurately fit the question.\u00a0 It is Pavlovian.\u00a0 For she and so many.\u00a0 The industry in hair weaves and extensions that reaps billions a year in pounds, dollars, euros and multiple other currencies throughout the world owes a healthy portion of its fortunes to this self-generating discourse.\u00a0 It\u2019s enough to make you bombaclot<\/em> upset, in the words of the Brummie rapper Lady Leshurr, both of whose parents migrated to the UK from the island of St. Kitts. \u00a0In the video for Leshurr\u2019s track Upset, she is joined at the conclusion by her friend and sometimes collaborator, Paigey Cakey, an emcee and actress from Hackney of Jamaican and white English parentage.\u00a0 The two are shown in an outdoor market and have both donned wigs that have a rasta-colored tam on top with long, fake dreads sewn on inside, which cascade down past the wearers\u2019 shoulders. \u201cBombaclot twelve years fuh deeze dreads, y\u2019see, ee<\/em>,\u201d Leshurr says to the camera, flipping up one of the fake locks.\u00a0 Cakey chimes in beside her, \u201cA-me mixed-race, y\u2019knuh. De dreads grow five years, y\u2019knuh.\u00a0 Bombaclot years!<\/em>\u201d They\u2019re having a laugh, and it is funny.\u00a0 But, what they are also doing is spelling out a pervasive anxiety over natural hair growth patterns and length in the wide variety of Afro hair that can find black girls just out of puberty covering up their healthy heads of hair with wigs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Location<\/em>: these interviews were conducted in the environs of commercial and commuter hubs in Stratford, a district of east London whose population, according to the 2011 UK census, is 21 percent black.\u00a0 The census categorizes Stratford\u2019s demographics as \u201cMulticultural Metropolitan: Inner City.\u201d The mixed-race population here is sizable \u2013 just scrutinize the collection of children in this video \u2013 because there has been considerable miscegenation between working-class Caribbean immigrants who began settling the area as early as the fifties and the resident English and Irish working class they met there.\u00a0 All over England such has been the case.\u00a0 In 2009, Samir Shah, former chairman of the Runnymede Trust, a think tank on issues of racial equality, wrote a controversial cover story for the Spectator<\/em>, \u201cRace is Not an Issue in the UK Anymore,\u201d in which he stated, \u201cToday, almost half of all children of Caribbean heritage have one white parent.\u00a0 Earlier this year, a report by the Institute for Social & Economic Research at Essex University said that the Afro-Caribbean community will \u2018virtually disappear\u2019 \u2014 dissolving into the white mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is a stark forecast on many fronts.\u00a0 One is the vista through which the mixed-race woman who is half-black and half-white has been a constant figure in Britain\u2019s music and pop culture scene from as far back as the fifties when Shirley Bassey debuted on the airwaves.\u00a0 A classic chanteuse in style and vocals, Dame Bassey was followed in the late seventies and early eighties by intentionally grittier Pauline Black and Rhoda Dakar, the two female vocalists most readily associated with the British Two Tone Movement. Black\u2019s and Dakar\u2019s interracial heritage symbolized their musical subculture\u2019s message of racial harmony and cultural syncretism inside Thatcherite Britain.\u00a0 Sade emerged later, in the early eighties, giving an international profile to British neo-soul.\u00a0 Later, when UK hip hop started to attract international recognition, its female emcees were led by Ms. Dynamite.\u00a0 Rolling into the 2000s and the televisualization of vocal performance, Leona Lewis shot to prominence when she won The X Factor<\/em> in 2006.\u00a0 Other artists continue to make their mark, among them Corinne Bailey Rae, and Emeli Sand\u00e9.\u00a0 All of these women are the daughters of Caribbean or African men and English or Scottish women.\u00a0 And, as most have expressed publicly at one point or another, being mixed-race in Britain has for them been a mixed bag of opportunities and setbacks.\u00a0 In 2014, the singer Tahliah Barnett who goes by the name FKA Twigs played her heritage in an interview with a journalist who brought up the media\u2019s habit of classifying her as \u201calt-R&B,\u201d overlooking the plethora of influences in her music.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s just because I’m mixed race,\u201d <\/em>FKA Twigs said.\u00a0 \u201cWhen I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: \u2018I’ve never heard anything like this before, it’s not in a genre.\u2019 And then my picture came out six months later, now she’s an R&B singer.\u00a0 I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song Preface is like a hymn. So, let’s talk about that.\u00a0 If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you’d be talking about the \u2018choral aspect.\u2019 But you’re not talking about that because I’m a mixed-race girl from south London.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Returning to the youth in the video, it seems for them mixed-race is a status beyond question.\u00a0 Viewed from a governmental perspective, this is ironic.\u00a0 The category of \u201cmixed race\u201d was made a box on the UK census in the year 2001, following, as political scientist Debra Thompson notes, near unanimous support for the proposal from government departments.\u00a0 Ironic, then, that an act of government undertaken with futurist ideals about inclusion has interbred with a hierarchical conception of (feminine) attractiveness and desirability, one that is antiquated and racist.\u00a0 One boy, for example, distracted in an exchange with his mate as he absorbs the question being asked him, leads with the astonishing preface, \u201cObviously<\/em>, mixed-race girls.\u201d\u00a0 What\u2019s obvious about it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As for the only other girl interviewed, a sentimental smile crosses her face when she replies in a croon, \u201cChocolate ones and light skin ones.\u201d From this girl\u2019s appearance, it seems highly likely that she herself is mixed-race.\u00a0 So, what harm, then, in desiring one\u2019s mirror image?\u00a0 None at all.\u00a0 Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz, both the children of one black and one Jewish parent, were one couple that did.\u00a0 But, then the girl\u2019s face turns from placid sentiment to hateful scowl when she concludes with a warning to all watching, \u201cDon\u2019t be dark, doah!\u201d (pronunciation of \u201cthough,\u201d another MLE-ism).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What, I wonder, was the sequence of steps taken in and by British society as a whole, from the turn of the millennium, around the point that this girl\u2019s mum and dad were drawn to each other, to now, when their daughter thinks nothing of going on social media to denounce the dark side of her provenance?<\/p>\n

In July, 2014, the Office of National Statistics issued a cross-analysis of its most recent demographic figures, \u201cWhat Does the 2011 Census Tell Us About Inter-ethnic Relationships?\u201d\u00a0 The report provides interesting findings on such topics as \u201cpatterns of inter-ethnic relationships,\u201d \u201cdifferences between men and women in inter-ethnic relationships,\u201d \u201cdependent children in multi-ethnic households.\u201d\u00a0 However, it does not offer any insight into attitudes towards racial background or racial appearance among inter-ethnic or mixed-race youth, and the wider implications of such attitudes.\u00a0 I am confidently hopeful that this needed research is either available or currently underway at governmental agencies, universities, and think tanks.<\/p>\n

This past holiday season was the tail end of a sabbatical year I took to complete a book on interracial attitudes and relationships in Britain between blacks and a more recent wave of newcomers: the now roughly 1 million Poles who began settling the country after 2004, when Poland joined the border-free European Union. My mother spent the holidays with me in London.\u00a0 One afternoon, she and I visited the sprawling Westfield Stratford City shopping centre, one of London\u2019s most ostentatious recent commercial developments, opened in 2011.\u00a0 Some of the interviews in this video were conducted there, as well as around the less flashy 1970s-built Stratford Centre, and the Stratford railway station, both not far away. \u00a0I am always happy to get my mother to London.\u00a0 She spent many formative years there, beginning in 1946 at the tender age of 19 as a student-nurse from what was then British Guiana, now Guyana.\u00a0 My mother\u2019s stories of post-war London recount a society coming to grips with the chromatic diversification of its citizenry.\u00a0 She has, since the 1980s when she began making return trips to visit her many relatives and friends who settled permanently in the city, been describing the sea change she notices in the demographic makeup.\u00a0 \u201cLondon is black,\u201d she would often say.\u00a0 To her, it is a city far unlike the one she traversed in the late forties, fifties, and sixties, where, on one memorable occasion, a white Englishman in Holborn tube station, infuriated at the sight of a young West Indian man and English girl showing PDA on the up escalator, bellowed across the cavernous tunnel from his down escalator, \u201cBloody well go and find your own kind!\u201d<\/p>\n

Two days before Christmas, 2016, the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre was packed with last-minute shoppers.\u00a0 Members of every conceivable race and ethnicity were present, with a preponderance of Afro-Caribbean descendants.\u00a0 My mother and I were served lunch by an Eastern European waitress, given movie-going advice from a hijabied Somali theatre attendant with a local accent, and when we stopped for a rest in a seating area, a mischievous little South Asian baby dangled her arms over the top of the adjacent banquette as her mother and sisters debated, in an accent subtly distinguishable from what\u2019s been described, whether to get their dad the new GPS or a different gift.<\/p>\n

My mother took it all in, looking at faces, listening to voices and their accents, eavesdropping on conversations, watching the ceaseless parade of couples pass by, their pairings of races, or skin tones within races, utterly unpredictable.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t talk about it then and there, but I knew what she was thinking.<\/p>\n

Now, five months later, I see this video. I recognize the backdrops, and I realize I was right there, self-satisfied at the time that my mother was able to witness the walking, talking evidence of progress.\u00a0 Had we overheard the wrong conversations that day?\u00a0 Should I have listened with a keener ear?\u00a0 Would I have caught the slights and slander the youth in this video utter?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have straight answers to these questions.\u00a0 My final thought, and I might be turning into a person of my parents\u2019 generation in expressing it, is with VanBanter, the conscious interviewer, in mind.\u00a0 Why are schoolboys, some barely 10, being questioned about picking up girls instead of about picking up their books?<\/p>\n

Chuh<\/em>!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nicholas Boston, Ph.D., is associate professor of media studies and sociology at the City University of New York (CUNY), Lehman College. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The author in London in August, 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A mere 2 minutes and 19 seconds in length, the video Are Black British Youth Obsessed with Light Skin\/Curly Hair. Or is it just Preference?\u201d is a compilation of snippets from \u201cperson on the street\u201d interviews, conducted in the environs of two shopping centers and a commuter railway station in east London (more on this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10006],"tags":[14,36422,1236,389],"class_list":["post-22634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-author","tag-race","tag-video","tag-viral","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22634"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24363,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22634\/revisions\/24363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}