If you were an avid Youtube audience member between the years of approximately 2016 to 2019, you probably remember those dreadful public interviews that seemed to multiply every day. These heavily edited videos were made with the idea being ‘more shock factor means more views’, so they broadcasted the most controversial of personal views that people could have. From videos on ‘what race would you not date?’ to Worldstar HipHop questions, we got to see it all. But one specific genre of video had a polarizing effect, especially on impressionable young Black people who were watching these videos. Videos that would ask whether people were ‘team light skin’ or ‘team dark skin’ and especially those asking which one the interview participant ‘preferred’ were a genre of Youtube content that was very popular. This recently sparked conversation on online platforms such as Twitter and TikTok, where Black people reviewed the content offered in these videos and their role in dividing the Black community and promoting colorism.
The people usually conducting these interviews were Black, contributing to some of the disappointment expressed by Black Twitter. These videos would include multiple responses where people would choose light-skinned people over dark-skinned people because they were 'too dark'. That statement itself is explicitly colorist, but the fact that one can rule out an entire skin tone as unattractive is also colorist. However, many people refuse to see this and have started to excuse these views as 'preferences'. Others have decided to leave the conversation of colorism 'in the past' using umbrella statements like 'we're all Black' to undermine the seriousness and reality of colorism and the experiences darker Black women face.
Colorism v Racism
Racism is the belief of discriminating against an entire race for believing that one's race is higher socially, biologically, psychologically, or by some other metric. Colorism is the discrimination of individuals in a group solely because they carry a darker skin tone. Colorism, in summary, is discrimination based on one's complexion being further from a 'white' one. It's the favoritism of lighter individuals in an ethnic or racial group. Within the Black Community, we see this manifested as the favoritism of light-skinned or mixed people, more specifically light-skinned or mixed women. Some may view it as a fetish. Colorism invites itself in so many different ways, for example, if you want a challenge for yourself: watch movies catered to Black people and count how many dark skin women are on screen, given significant air time, aren't being abused or tortured, and aren't portrayed as angry or mean or in some other negative manner. If you want a movie that manages to check off all those boxes, Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman accomplishes just that, unfortunately. In recent years, more movies have been produced to remedy the colorism in previous Black centered movies, but it shows that things only get done because people complain about it, not because the producers acknowledged that there was an issue with how they portrayed dark skin women.
Racism in media, in contrast, is the complete removal of representation or confining certain races to specific tropes. For example, the whitewashing of characters, meaning that they were originally non-White and then were turned into White ones for television or movies like Scarlett Johansson being cast in Ghost in a Shell, which was based on a manga series with solely Japanese characters. Hollywood is full to the brim with racial tropes: the quiet East Asian character, the happy or goofy or sassy Black best friend, the smart South Asian kid, so on and so forth. In the same way that these racist tropes promote incorrectly socializing the people watching them, so do colorist portrayals.
To be socialized by something means that you behave in a way that was acceptable by the society or community you lived in, specifically the ones you were surrounded by during your youth, as that is when you're most impressionable. Considering that there was a very long period, and to be fair said period is not over yet, where these negative portrayals of dark skin women were allowed-- it is not mind-boggling to understand why they are treated as if they fit said portrayals. The colorist narrative of light-skinned women being more attractive and calm-hearted left many to internalize the idea that dark-skinned women were undesirable and misbehaved and then reproduce it. A recent example of this would be a song made by artist DaniLeigh with lyrics saying 'yellowbone that's what he wants' and stated that the song was catered to all her 'light skin baddies out there'. When confronted with backlash, DaniLeigh responded with 'confusion'. She was simply just regurgitating the standards placed by society, standards that dictated that lighter women were the ones that Black men should go for instead of darker women. However, this was not DaniLeigh's place to say or even make the song about, since she wasn't black or yellowbone.
However, this is all just modern-day colorism. Colorism is not a new phenomenon.
History of Colorism in the Black Community
Black people being separated and treated differently is nothing new. During slavery, plantation work was split by skin tone; the darker-skinned Black souls worked outside on the fields and the lighter-skinned ones were allowed to work in the house since they were viewed as 'capable of more intelligent work' by slave masters. Also, sometimes, the light-skinned Black people were the offspring of rape perpetrated by slave masters. This practice created the terms 'house slave' and 'field slave', neither had it significantly better, but it was apparent that the labor of one was taken into consideration. Fast forward to the 20th century, the Brown Paper Bag Test rose to notoriety. The test was simple, anybody darker than the color of a brown paper bag failed, everybody lighter would pass. This test was used for almost all social events including at the doors of parties, as an entrance requirement for Black Greek Life, and even as a requirement to get jobs. Your complexion determined whether or not you would make it in society.
It is easy for us to look back on these and openly see them as instances of colorism. So, why is it difficult to acknowledge that behaviors we're seeing today are also...colorism? We can't just say colorism is a thing of the past because racism isn't a thing of the past. Colorism is an offshoot of racism, therefore, if there is still racism, there is still colorism. That is why these calls for us to drop the conversation of colorism are ignorant. If we just stopped talking about racism, we know all too good that it would not just evaporate into the sky and disappear but progressively get worse. And so, making 'we're all Black' statements are no use, as stating the obvious does not eliminate the issue. Yes, we are all Black, but some Black people face both racism and colorism, unlike others that only face racism. And for dark skin Black women, not only are they susceptible to face racism and colorism but also misogynoir. Therefore, we are not all experiencing the same effects brought about by our blackness.
In the same way these umbrella statements do not solve the issue of colorism, neither do the disguise of colorism under softer terms. A preference is a greater liking of one subject over another, but for you to have a preference, you would need to carry a level of fondness for the different subjects at hand. It is not a preference if you're berating dark skin women and dating light skin women, that is just colorism. We must learn to address it as such. Aside from that, carrying a greater liking for lighter people is also colorism, as then you insinuate that there is a reason as to why one is more likable than the other. Usually, the reasoning behind this is self-hate, a phenomenon where one is not pleased with themselves internally. Kodak Black, a dark-skinned man, once said that he would not date dark women because he was already "Black enough", directly expressing the self-hate he carried within himself.
Why Does It Matter: The Effects of Colorism on Young Black Girls
A few months ago, I was confronted with the question online as to why it mattered what a 'few' Black men felt about dark skin women because 'not all' Black men felt that way. It was in the comment section under a TikTok. TikTok has an age restriction of thirteen years old, but we know there are Black children on that app that are much younger than that. The very same way that I had access to that terrible comment section, full of Black young men making disgusting colorist remarks about dark-skinned women, is the same access that those kids would have. There were young Black boys and some lighter-skinned girls who would read those comments, already socialized by horrible media, and then reproduce comments like those thinking that they caused no harm. Meanwhile, dark-skinned little Black girls will learn from a young age that they are not appreciated and not wanted.
So why does it matter that some Black people think this way when 'not all' of us do? Because enough of us think this way. Black Twitter has made it a goal to combat 'generational evils', it only seems right that one of the evils we fight is the disregard and mistreatment of dark-skinned individuals within our community. 'We're all Black' and 'we're all oppressed' but does this excuse the oppression we inflict on our community members? The media is manipulatable, it only reflects someone's thought process, so how about the thoughts be uniting ones? Ones that instead of feeding into the hellspawn of white supremacy, combat them? We'd be saving so many little girls from self-hate and trauma by promoting healthier narratives surrounding dark-skinned people. I think it's time that Black people start analyzing and attacking their own implicit biases instead of sugar-coating them and putting them off to another time. There isn’t a more appropriate time to be a better member of the Black community than right now.
Written by Queenie-Michelle