Colorism Within The Black Community

Our skin color matters because we are visual and respond to one another based on our physical presence. Race-based prejudices have permanently been connected to specific skin colors.

Today, skin color becomes a loaded signifier of individuality and importance. But, especially in the U.S., where we have an incredibly varied population, race still matters, and color does.

As America becomes more multiracial —formed by interracial unions and immigration—continues to expand, color will be even more meaningful than race in public and private exchanges.?

Why? Because a person’s skin color is an irrefutable visual fact that is impossible to hide. In contrast,?race is a structured, quasi-scientific category that is often only visible on a government form. Think about it.

Our restricted official racial categories in the U.S.—black, white, American Indian, Asian, Mixed Race, and Native Hawaiian—are already struggling under the weight of our multi-hued, racially diverse, and ambiguous population. (Did anybody forget about Latinx?)?

A courageous conversation about “race” is no longer adequate when our first black president has a white mother. Golfer Tiger Woods is a “Cablinasian” (Caribbean and Asian as he called himself). A white woman named Rachel Dolezal feels vindicated in claiming a black identity without having any African ancestry. The critical discussion has to get more nuanced, and categories beyond black and white must be created. Or no categories at all. Why fit into a box? Does that further discrimination?

In the meantime, skin color will serve as the most apparent criterion in determining how a person will be evaluated and judged. Dark skin is often demonized because of deeply entrenched racism in this country. Light skin individuals always win the prize. And that happens because this country was built on principles of racism. It cannot be overstated that if racism didn’t exist, a discussion about varying skin hues would be about esthetics.?

That’s not the case. Instead, the favoring of light skin over dark is at the root of an illness well-known as colorism.

The author and activist Alice Walker is most often credited with first using colorism aloud and in media print. In an essay that emerged in her 1983 book, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker defined colorism as “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.” Of course, light-skin preference had been standard practice in the black community for generations. However, Walker gave it a name and marked it as an evil that must be stopped for African Americans to continue progressing as a people and as a race.

Black Americans are not the only people infatuated with how light or dark a person’s skin is. Colorism is a societal ill felt in several places worldwide like Southeast Asia, East Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.?

Because we are such diverse people with citizens hailing from all corners of the globe, our brand of colorism is both domestic and imported. But, please make no mistake; white Americans are as “colorist” as their brown and black brothers and sisters.

Shankar Vedantam, author of the book, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. He is A science journalist for The Washington Post. Vedantam’s research touched upon skin color and how even the most liberal-minded progressive thinkers still display a bias towards fair or light-colored skin.?

He told the New York Times in 2010: “Dozens of research studies have shown that skin tone and other racial features play powerful roles in who gets ahead and who does not. These factors regularly determine who gets hired, who gets convicted, and who gets elected.”

It has been constantly proven that skin tone plays a role in who gets ahead and who does not.?Researchers and scholars are now systematically tracking its existence.

For example, a 2006 University of Georgia research discovered that companies of any race prefer light-skinned black men to dark-skinned men irrespective of their credentials. Sociologist Margaret Hunter writes in her book, Race, Gender and the Politics of Skin Tone, that Mexican Americans with light skin “earn more money, complete more years of education, live in more integrated neighborhoods and have better emotional health than do darker-skinned Mexican Americans.”?

In 2013, researchers Lance Hannon, Robert DeFina, and Sarah Bruch found that black female school children with dark skin were three times more prone to be suspended than their light-skinned African-American sisters.

Suffice it to say, one’s health, abundance, and opportunity for success in this country will be affected by the color of one’s skin, sometimes regardless of one’s racial background. Even darker-hued white people have different encounters than their lighter-hued Caucasian counterparts regarding access and resources. Unfortunately, colorism is so profoundly ingrained in the fabric of this nation that we are all infected by its presence. And the unfortunate reality is, for a lot of people, the lessons of color bias begin in the home.

In black families, Latinx families, Asian-American families, and interracial ones, too, skin colors can vary in microscopic gradients or prominent shades of difference. Luckily, many parents can create a safe space in the home where skin color variations only make a difference when it is time to buy sunscreen. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of a color hierarchy in the outside world seeps into the household. It becomes part of the implicit and explicit biases.

That is not to say that the explanation to solving our color problem as a country lies in the home, but that is indeed where the critical conversation should begin. First, parents of every color should start celebrating color differences in the human continuum instead of applauding one over the other or, even worse, pretending we’re all the same. Then, we could have a more public-facing, cross-cultural dialogue about the more global problem of colorism and plot its necessary demise.