from the 7” single, Grape Records, 1969
“…the ladder get high, the ladder get high…” Leading, and attempting to encourage, a discussion on race & ethnicity with 18-25 year olds is awfully difficult these days, with them all having been saturated by the credo of political correctness since their inceptions, kids are so afraid of potentially sounding racist that conversation is wholly diminutive & stalled out. The trouble with that lies in the fact that we, as a culture being far more diverse than any other nation on Earth, desperately need healthy and informed exchange on race more than ever. The simplistic notion that electing a black president would somehow catapult society into a post-racial existence was both amateurish & uninformed in scope, because the real latent effect of said presidency has been an uncovering of many Americans’ hidden fears & long-standing prejudices, attitudes that our P.C. culture had disguised as increased tolerance, revealing a sizable fraction of the nation that’s almost every bit as prone to histrionic fallacies of logic when dealing with race-based issues (um, concocting stories about beheaded white people in the Arizonan desert much??!?) as we were 40+ years ago. I never have found any solid information on Carlton Alphonso, other than that he was a rock steady singer from Jamaica in the late ‘60s, releasing this and at least two other singles. I can listen to these early, rough reggae cuts all the day long…
from the 7” single, Grape Records, 1969
