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Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Darkness

<not racist>
Wesley Snipes is easily the blackest celebrity alive
</not racist>

I had seen in him several films before, and realized his extreme levels of darkness, but had sort of forgotten about it; probably as a side-effect of Hollywood also having forgotten about him.

However, I was looking up info on the newly-released DVD Unstoppable, and came to found out there was an earlier movie with the same title featuring Mr. Snipes.


I was reminded, upon seeing this cover, of the aforementioned darkness that I had long forgotten. I felt that this particular cover helped prove my case exceedingly well, given its stylistic composition.

Clearly, Mr. Snipes is in the middle of the cover, with the dramatically italicized font at the top, and blurry action goodness at the bottom. But beyond those surface facts, it's also important to note that Wesley is surrounded by what appears to be flames. Perhaps he's "unstoppably" on his way to the burn ward in this film? But I digress

Presumably, the left and center parts of his face are well-lit by the fire, yet despite this highlighting it seems that not even the fire's light can battle his extreme darkness effectively.

Let's examine this scientifically, using the magic of Photoshop®, and the following photo:


Using the luminosity histogram tool on a section of his face that has a decent amount of his skin tones, we can see the following:


According to the graph, we can see Wesley's mean blackness is 72, on a scale of 1-255. 1 being absolute black, and 255 being me with my shirt off. This means, that on the way to absolute black, from white, Wesley is 71.7% of the way there.


By contrast, Flavor Flav is appoximately 62.2% black.


Often reported to be the blackest man, Lance Reddick is, on average, 67.8% black.

I've heard it said that Samuel L Jackson is the blackest, but I won't even justify that with a histogram, as anyone with light-sensing vision can tell that even Flavor has lower luminosity. I was also going to calculate Eddie Murphy's levels, but I felt his head was too large, and thus was too affected by sunlight falling on its surface, as you can see here:


 Luckily for Mr. Snipes, Manute Bol died in 2010. Manute was a shoe-in for this competition, as we can see below:


Besting even Mr. Snipes' black-nisity by almost 5%.

Unless someone can find a current celebrity with more blackness, I feel pretty confident in awarding Mr. Snipes the coveted "Current Blackest Celebrity Award".


Kudos, sir. May you continue to reflect the least amount of light for years to come.

<not racist>
This article
</not racist>

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