yrlancslad,

Re your 20 Jun 06 - 10:47 PM post in which you wrote that
[yellow girls]is a "phrase which not only is not racist, it's not even derogatory, it's value-free descriptive-black men, white women, yellow girls"...

My comment doesn't address whether you should or should not sing songs with the phrase "yellow girls {or "yella gals"}, however I do want to pass on the information that 'yellow girls' was often a referent for women who were racially mixed {Black/White}. Imo, it isn't historically or currently true to say that "yella girls" is a value-free descriptive.

In one level, as your noted, women who were 'yella' were considered favorably [compared to darker skinned women]. Because physical beauty and self-worth has been defined so long using Euro-centric standards, fairer skinned women {often with "White" features and "White" hair texture} were considered to be better than their dark skinned sisters. However, the 'rub' was that they could never be as good as White women.

See online resources about "the tragic mulatto". Here is an excerpt from one website:

The mulatto woman was depicted as a seductress whose beauty drove White men to rape her. This is an obvious and flawed attempt to reconcile the prohibitions against miscegenation (interracial sexual relations) with the reality that Whites routinely used Blacks as sexual objects. One slaver noted, "There is not a likely looking girl in this State that is not the concubine of a White man...."7 Every mulatto was proof that the color line had been crossed. In this regard, mulattoes were symbols of rape and concubinage. Gary B. Nash summarized the slavery-era relationship between the rape of Black women, the handling of mulattoes, and White dominance...

Though skin color came to assume importance through generations of association with slavery, white colonists developed few qualms about intimate contact with black women. But raising the social status of those who labored at the bottom of society and who were defined as abysmally inferior was a matter of serious concern. It was resolved by insuring that the mulatto would not occupy a position midway between white and black. Any black blood classified a person as black; and to be black was to be a slave.... By prohibiting racial intermarriage, winking at interracial sex, and defining all mixed offspring as black, white society found the ideal answer to its labor needs, its extracurricular and inadmissible sexual desires, its compulsion to maintain its culture purebred, and the problem of maintaining, at least in theory, absolute social control."

The Tragic Mulatto Myth

-snip-

Although many movies and books focus on the 'yellow girls', there are also sterotypes about 'yella men' who were also considered to be tragic because supposedly they also longed to be White, but could never achieve that goal {of course many fair skinned Black people have passed into the White race, but that's appears to be subject that many White people either don't know about or rarely acknowledge}...

In this age of political correctness, some people think that any mention of skin color is a no-no. I don't take that position. However, I do recognize that for the most part, referring to people as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon etc is just not done {though, it seems that it is alright-some of the time-to refer to people as 'biracial'[which is the "new mulatto" term that doesn't only refer to Black/White mixtures, but strictly speaking neither does mulatto, quadroon etc}.

One reason why many African Americans [and probably other Black folk] don't like the term mulattos, etc {up to and including the term 'biracial'} is that we have struggled with color divisions among us and such color references or references to mixed racial heritage {especially since so many of us are racially mixed} have and can still serve as a means of dividing us and weakening our goal of unity and [political and other forms of] power.

So imo, when you sing of yellow girls, it can raise all this history and current day ramifications.

Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't use this phrase. But I do think that it is important to know what that phrase means, and why some Black folks and other people have a problem with it.