This one passage, which is the only thing I am commenting on in this otherwise excellent article, is about people like me. You are saying "It is OK to discriminate against people like him, just don't discriminate against people like me." The problem with this statement is that the rest of the article is a conversation about who gets to participate in that conversation. You want me to stay out of this conversation because I’m not black (although if I had used a different avatar, you would never have known this, and might have considered my statement on its own merits.) But the people you are speaking to are saying people like you are not really Black. So how can you keep me out of the conversation without having them exclude you from the conversation?

I am partly involved in this conversation for the sake of my biracial nieces and nephews, who encounter the sort of colorism that you are describing here. But my personal stake comes from being a person who is told that my skin color automatically makes me some kind of “culture vulture”: that if Amanda Seales had been white, you would have been perfectly OK with the abuse that was heaped upon her for playing a particular kind of music. Not all discrimination is racism, and this discrimination doesn't hurt me anywhere near as much as racism hurts Black people. But I am saying that if you want to maintain that kind of discrimination against me, you will be aiding and abetting the colorism that hurts you.