CHAPTER 2
COLORISM
Colorism is not unique to black Americans; people of color around the world—from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, etc.—are impacted by global colorism, or the widespread elevation of light skin tones over darker skin across all communities of color.
—JeffriAnne Wilder
Mi mami tells me to get out of the sun. Mi mami tells me to put on sunblock. Mi mami tells me to not go to the beach so much. But she is not protecting me from skin cancer; that is not really on our immigrant radar nor our primary worry, unfortunately. She is not telling me to stay out of the sun out of a deep concern for my health. Mi mami does not want me to be too brown.
You see, mi mami is from the mountains of Jinotega, Nicaragua. The mountains, where the temperature stays at a cool sixty degrees Fahrenheit. It is foggy, and people often wear sweaters. Mi mami, like many of her townspeople, is light skinned. She does not tan in the sun; she burns. Mi mami turns bright red, gets sunburned in ways I have never experienced. But she is not as light skinned as my tias and her youngest brother, Tio Ivan. Mi mami has dark black hair and mi tias all have light-brown and ash-blonde hair. Since mi mami is one of the oldest among her siblings and cousins, and since each child born after her was fairer than the last, my family would joke, “la raza mejoró” with every child. And it should be noted that mi mami’s skin tone at her darkest is my skin tone at its lightest.
Mi mami was born of a green-eyed, light-brown-haired, light-skinned man: mi abuelito Nicolas. Everyone hopes that my grandfather’s light-eyes genes will be passed down and resurface someday, though it seems to’ve skipped two entire generations at this point. His mother was an Afro-Nicaragüense, but we do not talk about that. I learned about mi Black bisabuela in my late twenties, through a casual, happenstance conversation that left me surprised. Everyone else seemed content with this erasure.
I, however, have my papi’s genes. My papi’s side of the family is darker. They have Brown skin and very prominent traditional Indigenous features, like flat faces, wider noses, and straight black or brown hair. My papi is not ashamed of his Brownness. On the contrary, mi papi does not worry about his skin tone. He enjoys sitting in the sun unfettered, while mi mami wears a hat, sunglasses, and a long-sleeve shirt if she is able. But my papi is a man, and standards of admiration for men stem from their ability to perform some arbitrary definition of manhood. That is not to say that mi papi has not experienced discrimination due to his Brownness. I have vivid memories of the hyper policing mi papi experienced after 9/11 along with many other Black and Brown men in this country. These random body checks by the Transportation Security Administration were quite difficult to disregard as just coincidences. However, when I was growing up, how much money a man could provide for his household held more intracommunal value than his skin tone. On the other hand, women were valued for our fragility, our purity, and our proximity to white standards of beauty.
I understood this growing up. The “prettiest” girls in my classes were always the ones who had light skin, light eyes, and light hair.
Mi mami tells me to get out of the sun. Mi mami tells me to put on sunblock. Mi mami tells me to not go to the beach so much. Because I have my papi’s Brownness but mi mami’s gender, a curse—I was born female and Brown, in a cultura that hates females and especially hates the darker ones.
But avoiding the sun feels unnatural and distasteful, when I know full well that the politics of pigmentation have been telling my people that being Black and Brown is bad and that getting darker is your own damn fault. Despite having grown up with meager means, we do not want to appear like we have worked in fields. It is shameful to own your poverty, and more shameful if your skin begins to tell the tale of your misfortunes. Our communities act like Brownness is optional, like we can dim our skin tone by avoiding the sun and hope that the yellow undertones eventually turn pink.
Mi mami tells me to get out of the sun. Mi mami tells me to put on sunblock. Mi mami tells me to not go to the beach so much. Mi mami tells me that I am becoming negra, with rechazo in her tone.
But I cannot undo the fact that my skin glows from all this sunlight. Like magic, my skin turns sunrays into nutrients, into vitamin D. You ask me what color my skin tone is, and I will tell you: It is a morning cafecito con leche with your abuelita. It is a caramelo tint that looks unreal, painted beautifully on my flesh. I do not burn with the sun; I evolve right before my very eyes. My Brown skin is beautiful. In the winter it becomes a lighter shade, the color of walnuts, and in the summer it darkens. I have to change my makeup with the seasons to match my beautiful, evolving skin tone, because my skin is supernatural.
I love my Brown skin, but it has taken me years to realize that and to undo the years of the sun-avoidance dance that many of us Brown girls are told to perform.
Mi mami tells me to get out of the sun. Mi mami tells me to put on sunblock. Mi mami tells me to not go to the beach so much. And I understand what she is doing, I understand what her life has taught her about Brownness, but I insist on living differently. I decline, because I refuse to let the color of my skin and my gender make me hide under ridiculous gorros. I refuse to incomodarme for a cultura that breeds colorism. Instead, I wear my tiniest bikini and I go to the beach, put on sunblock to protect this beautiful Brown skin I have been blessed with, and watch magic happen.
Colorism a byproduct of racism and shares many of the same qualities and characteristics. For example, colorism, like racism, is deeply embedded within societal structures (e.g., education, politics, the media) and can be institutionalized.
—JeffriAnne Wilder
My experiences with colorism are as a non-Black woman of color, and will not claim fluency in colorism within Black communities. I am an expert of my lived experiences. My experiences with colorism at home are hard to pinpoint and relate, because they never felt like discrete incidents; colorism was just always there.
After completing graduate school, I returned home. I was experiencing a lot of the trauma that comes with existing as a nonwhite person in predominantly white spaces. I had lived the majority of my life in Latinx neighborhoods, which meant that I had no real coping skills for the ways white people protected and abused their privilege. But my body took all that in, and when I graduated it felt tired and I needed rest. Fortunately, mi mami is traditional in the way that she assumes her children are her responsibility until her last dying breath, so she invited me to move back home. She insisted.
Mindfully returning home meant acknowledging the ways I had changed. I finally knew how to speak up for myself. I had learned the language to name my experiences, which allowed me to heal from my childhood. Coming back home was terrifying, but I also had no real job prospects at that point. Nobody tells working-class students of color that our reality will not change much even after getting multiple fancy degrees. No one mentions in the “stay in school” propaganda that even when we have our education, the assumption of our inferiority persists. No one told me I had been fooled into believing in a system that was fundamentally designed to destroy me.
When I moved back home, I found myself crying a lot. I took many odd jobs, working at the private agency that handled Section 8 housing in Miami-Dade County, working on the floor at a Neiman Marcus outlet store. I even attempted to apprentice as a piercer at a tattoo parlor. I was mourning the loss of my first marriage, I was mourning my disillusionment with the American Dream, and I was mourning my loss of innocence. Adulthood as a woman of color required that I harden myself and keep my heart shielded. When I mourn, I seek solace in nature; I applied for jobs while sitting on a towel on Miami Beach, and it was there that I wrote often.
After a few months of being home, I remember one day coming back from the beach and mi mami saying that specific comment: “Te estás poniendo negra.” When mi mami said that, she was saying that I will darken to an unacceptable Brown, thus insinuating that darkness is inferior. She was expressing both anti-Indigeneity and
also anti-Blackness. For non-Black POC, this is our colorism, seen and felt in the constant policing of our Brownness in its many tints and hues.
And while my experiences with colorism growing up had been hard to name and process, hearing this kind of “everyday colorism” at age thirty was different. I was now an adult with better tools to think critically about the things we casually say. That comment by mi mami hit me, hard. I also knew that her comment did not stand alone; it was part of a sea of normalized colorism that our communities enact toward one another. Somehow, among BIPOC, colorism is often disguised as genuine concern.
I did not know the term colorism until I got to graduate school. By learning in adulthood what colorism is, and what it does within my community, I grew to understand how those comments had shaped me growing up as a little Brown girl. I also have to accept how those comments still shape me today as a Brown woman. I refer to that comment mi mami made on that day when I came home from the beach as horizontal violence. This seemingly harmless gesture of concern is in fact an act of violence. We inflict this within our own communities; it is violence enacted by us and to us. We somehow have allowed ourselves not only to internalize racism, but to become Brown white supremacists. This is not an individual critique on mi mami; this is a larger conversation about the normalization of the supremacy of whiteness through colorism.
I grew up in a Latinx city, but more specifically in a non-Black Latinx neighborhood. The majority of the population of Miami-Dade County is Latinx and/or Caribbean. But like most major cities, Miami has neighborhoods that are siloed by race, nationality, or both. For example, back in the early nineties, Sweetwater was a primarily non-Black Nicaraguan neighborhood. So, my exposure to colorism came through a non-Black Latinx lens. The type of horizontal violence that is done in non-Black Latinx neighborhoods mirrors the type of violence that we enact toward one another back in our home countries, where proximity to whiteness is prized. Non-Black Latinx colorism is regularly carried out by our families, friends, media, and sometimes even by ourselves as a survival tactic.
In Nicaragua, I was bought up to believe I was mestiza. I remember when my baby sister was getting her first bath at home, I saw her Mongolian spot and I asked my mom about it. She told me that it was a spot all mestizos have, and it fades as they get older. The Mongolian spot signified our Indigenous ancestors, and she told me that we had all had our own Mongolian spot. Yet, I have a Black great-grandmother on my maternal side and a Black uncle on my paternal side, and their Blackness is not part of the constructed mestiza racial identity I was taught to claim. To be mestiza is to be mixed specifically with Spanish and non-Black Indigenous ancestry—the Mongolian spot reference. However, technically I cannot be mestiza when I know I have Spanish, Indigenous, and Black ancestors. To identify as mestiza is to erase all my Black ancestors. My family, like many mestizos, has absorbed Blackness into our gene makeup, music, and customs but erased said Blackness entirely when identifying racially as mestizo. That is precisely why I do not identify as mestiza. Because in this way, we gatekeep mestizaje and erase the richness of our Black ancestry.
Black people can be Indigenous. There are also other racial categories that have been erased with time. An example in Nicaragua is that we have a history of multiple race categories dating back to the 1800s. The racial categories that existed were casta, ladino, zambo, mulato, mestizo, blanco, and negro. These racial categories include the mixing of Indigenous and Black, which is zambo. The categories also unveil the fact that white people have existed in Latin America. Furthermore, there were entire communities that did not mix and stayed racially Black. But today, mestizo and mulato are the two primary identifications that are commonly used, precisely to erase Indigeneity and Blackness except when in service to whiteness. Mestizo means someone who is European, Spanish specifically, and Indigenous, while mulato means someone who is Spanish and Black. We have erased all other racial categories when we should not have.
For me, to identify as mestiza is to perpetuate the same colonial structures and eugenic thinking. I often self-identify as a non-Black Latina to highlight the issue of anti-Blackness—which shapes our identities vastly in Latin America and the Caribbean—by centering Blackness and my relationship to it. Additionally, this is not to say that there are not exclusively mestizo people, because there are; similarly, there are exclusively European folks living in Latin America and the Caribbean, like in Argentina, which has a substantial German and Italian population. However, since I write in first person, these are my lived experiences, with a very beautiful but complex family history that includes Indigenous, Spanish, and Black ancestry.
Colorism is often thought of as an issue exclusively affecting Black communities, where those who are lighter skinned obtain certain privileges due to their proximity to whiteness. Across the board, colorism means the privileging and prioritizing of lighter-skinned people of a specific racial or ethnic group. So, much to a lot of people’s surprise, colorism is global. Other communities of color experience colorism because anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity is as expansive as colonialism.
Colorism in my particular non-Black Latina experience is anti-Indigenous. Back when the European conquests began in the Americas, rape, fornication, and marriages occurred between Indigenous women and Spanish men. The children that resulted from such unions meant the need for a new categorization, due to the revulsion that Spanish people had toward Indigenous people. Since these children were partially Spanish, the desire to acknowledge their elevated Spanish blood created the need for a new description. Yet, the children were still considered to be Indigenous, and they were not allowed to be fully acknowledged as Spanish. This new racial category was meant to highlight proximity to whiteness, centering whiteness as superior. That is where mestizaje comes from, a desire to not be fully associated with an inferior race while acknowledging their elevated Spanish ancestry. Mestizaje is steeped in a history of hate and trauma, and through that hate and trauma comes the repulsive scale of colorism that I grew up intimately knowing. The children of this mixing have built nation-states whose entire identities revolve around the maintenance of anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness, which is why colorism needs to be undone.
Also, colorism is rooted in anti-Blackness. It is a system that places value on lightness and devalues darkness. Darkness, Blackness, is placed at the bottom rung of this fucked scale. So, while on the surface my non-Black Latina experiences with colorism were in a very directly anti-Indigenous context, this system is also automatically anti-Black in its agenda because the goal is whiteness and not the other way around. Colorism is a child of racism, and both are strategic constructions meant to give whiteness superiority over all other racial identities.
Colorism is about skin pigmentation, but it is also about facial features and hair types. Because the goal of colorism is to position whiteness as superior, white skin is placed at the top of these reprehensible hierarchies. Getting into the weeds, two people with similar skin tones can be differentiated and ranked based on facial features and hair color and texture. So, in addition to skin color, wider noses, bigger lips, and tighter curls are stereotypically associated with Blackness, and the goal is white skin, a small nose, small lips, and straight hair. Proximity to whiteness gives a person of color privilege over other BIPOC, and this inner hierarchy was created to delegitimize BIPOC experiences as a whole. All this is to say, it is self-destructive but prevalent.
Colorism took another form in school and socially. I learned that how I looked was a problem among mestizos. I am racialized as Brown, my nose is wider, my hair is straight and dark brown, and I have a flat face with higher cheekbones. My features fit the stereotype of what Indigenous people are “supposed” to look like. So, I am acutely aware of how white I do not look. Even when I avoid the sun, I still have nonwhite facial features and straight, dark hair. But I learned the extent of my nonwhiteness through some very harsh life lessons.
In fifth grade, I attempted to grow out my hair for
the first time. Mi mami, like many Latinas, had been forced to keep her hair long, and her way of emancipating herself was by cutting it into a pixie cut when she first got married. And mi mami never wanted me to feel that pressure, and so she kept my hair short for most of my life.
I never thought much about it; it was a decision made for me. So, in fifth grade, my desire to grow out my hair was not something I had invested a lot of time into. I just stopped getting haircuts. And as my hair began to grow longer, I began to get teased by my classmates. I attended a non-Black Latinx elementary school, so there were a few of us who were Brown; whiteness was understood as superior through the idolization of the popular girls, who were all white-passing. The microaggressions I experienced changed when I began to grow out my hair.
They started to call me what is often still used as an insult or a slur when referring to Indigenous people in Latin America and the Caribbean: “India,” they said. What they were teaching me was that I was ugly because I looked Indigenous.
I was only in fifth grade, and the lesson I learned on that day was that it was my job to manage how people would accept me. It was my job to manage my appearance. I have really straight, dark brown hair, and how I styled it and cut it meant a lot to me in terms of negotiating my identity. After that experience I kept my hair short, because growing my hair out still triggered some strong gut reaction that reminded me that I am not supposed to love myself.
Decades later, the act of growing out my hair took a lot of self-awareness and healing. Having long hair meant embracing those roots that are a part of me and embracing my ancestors. Everybody covets long, straight hair, but still the preference is with light-colored hair on white skin. White women can have long, dark, straight hair and still be considered desirable. If it is on the face and body of an undesirable other, a BIPOC—in those cases long, dark, straight hair becomes undesirable. Colorism dictates that some things are not inherently bad unless they are attached to darker bodies. Whiteness is queen, king, and army.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 4