This value system has become ingrained in us. As a teen, I became obsessed with the attention of boys, and equally fixated, if not more so, on the light-skinned girls who, I felt, would walk into a room and immediately snatch that attention away. I disliked them on sight.
My mother is light skinned, and she grew up having girls say to her face: “You think you’re so much better than me.” Mom and her sisters saw their light skin as a burden. They were called piss colored and listened to chants of “light, bright, and damn near white.” My mother told me that she married a darker-skinned black man because she didn’t want her kids to have “light-skin problems.” I can imagine my grandmother’s face when Mom brought home Cully Union.
My mother felt the burden, but I witnessed the privilege. Inheriting my father’s skin, but growing up in proximity to my mother’s lightness and to the lightness of my cousins, I saw how people across the whole color spectrum responded differently to them than they did to me. In my view, there was simply no comparison in our plights. It was impossible not to grow to resent that.
We darker girls should not be pitted against our lighter-skinned sisters, but our pain at being passed over also shouldn’t be dismissed by people saying, “Love the skin you’re in.” You can love what you see in the mirror, but you can’t self-esteem your way out of the way the world treats you. Not when we are made to feel so unloved and exiled to the other end of the beauty spectrum.
I e-mailed a young friend of mine telling her that I wanted to write about colorism. She replied immediately. “Sometimes it makes me feel crazy,” she told me, “because when I bring up the issue it’s met with confusion or disbelief.” This gorgeous young woman blessed with darker skin had tried to self-esteem herself into fulfillment for years, but her experience with colorism left her feeling hopelessly alone. My friend had no problem getting a date, but finding amazing black men who truly love darker-skinned women proved to be a challenge. “The truth is, there are just certain men that are not and will never check for you,” she says. “At least not seriously.”
Perhaps more isolating, whenever she has raised the issue of colorism with friends or men, she is told that she is creating and encouraging division within the community. “People tell me I’m just imagining these feelings,” she said; they think she’s exaggerating the effects of colorism she experiences professionally and socially.
She’s not. She is not imagining this shit, and she is not alone. For decades, sociologists like Margaret Hunter have collected real empirical evidence that we are color struck. Darker-skinned people face a subset of racial inequalities related to discipline at school, employment, and access to more affluent neighborhoods. In one study, Hunter found that a lighter-skinned woman earned, on average, twenty-six hundred dollars more a year than her darker sister. In her 2002 study of the color stratification of women, Hunter also presented real statistical evidence showing that light-skinned African American women had “a clear advantage in the marriage market and were more likely to marry high-status men than were darker-skinned women.”
I have my own case study. My first husband was dark skinned, and I was the darkest-skinned woman he ever dated. Once he got a little success in football, he told me, “I wanted the best.” What he considered the best, a sign that he had “made it,” was dating light-skinned girls. It showed he had the ability to break through class and color barriers. He chose to marry me because I was famous and had money. For him, that trumped color.
“The number-one draft pick or the up-and-coming action hero will never choose me, because I’m dark skinned,” my friend said. On the other hand, she has sometimes felt fetishized by men who briefly date her solely for the visual. “After Lupita got big, I noticed it was trendy to like me,” she said. “On that note, white men love me. It’s almost like a validation for them. ‘Look at this black woman on my arm, natural hair, black skin, natural ass . . . See, I’m down!’
“It’s hard to gauge who really likes me,” she continued, “and who just wants to use me as an accessory. I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m not worthy, so when someone says that I am, it feels like a setup.”
When black men are just honest with me, they admit that their vision of success most often does not include expanding on their blackness. “It’s lightening up my gene pool,” one guy boldly told me. “If I have a baby with you, we’re gonna have a black-ass baby.” When Serena Williams, whose fiancé is white, announced her pregnancy, a light-skinned black guy with twenty-one thousand followers announced on Twitter: “Can’t blame her for needing a lil’ milk in her coffee to offset those strong genes for generations to come.”
That’s some shit, and it hurts. We talked about the disconnect between the adoration so many black men shower on their mothers and grandmothers and their refusal to spend the rest of their lives with a woman who resembles their hue. “Why isn’t the same type of woman good enough or even worth considering?” she asked me. “And do they even know they’re doing this?”
There is another question I have to ask. Aren’t these men also acutely aware of what it is to move through this world in the body of a dark brown boy? These men grow up seeing how people with lighter skin are respected and treated differently. Dark skin is weaponized and continually used against us day to day. What if it’s not simply preference or acquiring a status symbol, but a learned tactic of survival?
I say this as someone who was certainly guilty of being color struck when I began dating. In my junior year of high school, I knew I was cute because I began pulling people that dark-skinned black girls were not supposed to pull. That was the barometer of my beauty: who and what I was winning in spite of my blackness. These boys were all top athletes, and I saw the admiration my dad had for me as I was dating them. My dad would go to their games and invite neighbors over to meet them. The more he bragged, the more validated I was that I was doing something right. “If I don’t pull somebody that other people want and that crowds actually cheer for . . .” The stakes got higher and higher.
Eventually I didn’t necessarily need to be the girlfriend. I just needed these guys to choose me in the moment, over someone else. That line of thinking can get you very sexually active very quickly. And it just kind of got away from me. You find yourself, a couple of Keystone Lights in, kissing some random guy in the bathroom of a house party. Some guy you don’t know at all, who maybe isn’t even your type, but just looked your way . . . and you needed that validation fix.
For the longest time, I wouldn’t date anyone darker than me. It was so ingrained in me that I didn’t see it as an active choice that I was friend-zoning anyone with more melanin than me. In my early twenties, someone finally did an intervention. I was having lunch with my older sister and one of her guy friends, Eric, at a soul food spot, of all places. I was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ERASE RACISM. I was making some point about power structures in relationships, feeling woke as fuck.
“Well, let’s talk about how you’re color struck,” said Eric.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I’ve known you since you were, what, twelve, thirteen?” he said. “The guys you’ve said you had crushes on and the guys that you dated, none of them are darker than you. A lot of them are a lot lighter than you. Have you thought about why that is?”
“Look,” I said, “I actually don’t think about that stuff. Love sees no color.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “To say ‘love sees no color’ is dumb as fuck. If that beautiful love of yours were kidnapped, you wouldn’t go to the police and say, ‘Help, a lovely soul was snatched off the street . . .’”
“No,” I said, making a face in the hope that we’d just drop it.
“You’d give a thorough-ass description,” he said. “Height, weight, scars, and you’d start with skin color and tone. You actually do see each other, quite clearly, and that’s amazing.”
I pretended to be really intent on my mac and cheese.
“Love sees everything,” Eric said. �
�You’re making a choice. And when you make that choice of putting yourself in a position to fall in love with a very specific person who looks nothing like yourself, that does actually say something about your choices.”
So I got real. Right there, in my now ridiculous Erase Racism shirt, I opened up about my choices. I talked about feeling passed over for white and lighter-skinned girls and the rush I felt every time I got someone they were supposed to get. As I spoke, I realized it had so little to do with the actual guy. It wasn’t my preference for light-skinned guys. It was all about their preference for me.
People underestimate the power of conversation. That lunch intervention gave me permission to like other people. If I could truly love my own skin, then I was not going to see darker skin as a threat to my worthiness and my value. Then it was come one, come all.
Shortly after, I met my cousin’s former football teammate Marlin, whose nickname was literally Darkman. Marlin was midnight black, with a perfect smile and a gorgeous body. I met him at this massive sports bar called San Jose Live, and he had such enthusiasm about the music playing that with every new song he was like, “That’s my jam!” He was a hard dancer, meaning that you’d feel like a rag doll keeping up, but he was sweet. We ended up dating for two years, until I met my first husband and broke up with him. My first husband was chocolate brown, beefy, and covered in tattoos. He didn’t look like anyone I had dated, either.
When I got divorced and I went flying through my bucket list of dicks, they came in all shapes and sizes. This new approach was liberating. I felt open like a twenty-four-hour Walmart on freaking Black Friday.
Once I dated black men, I felt like I could breathe. Exhale and inhale deeply, without the anxiety of being examined by others to ensure that I was the “right kind of black” to even qualify to date interracially. When I dated nonblack men, there was always the Get Out fear of meeting their parents. My college boyfriend’s parents were nice to my face but called him a nigger lover and accused him of screwing up his life dating a black girl. Now I no longer had to endure the constant evaluations of my character, looks, and accomplishments from his friends and from strangers witnessing a white man being publicly affectionate with me. It drove me crazy to watch them look at us, puzzling out the equation of why I would be worthy of his touch. I could breathe.
I think that might be the biggest reason so many people root for me and Dwyane. He chose an undeniably black woman. When you have struggled with low self-esteem, to have anyone root for you feels good. To have women rooting for you who have been in your shoes and felt the pain you felt, feels likes a thousand little angel wings beating around you.
OF COURSE COLORISM ISN’T JUST CONFINED TO BEING AFRICAN AMERICAN. Or even American. In 2011, I went to Vietnam to film the Half the Sky documentary with Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the New York Times. We were there to delve into issues around education and young women, but when we landed, I immediately saw all these surgical masks. I wondered what I was walking into. Was there some kind of viral outbreak? If so, I was going to need one of those masks. It was also oppressively hot, yet people wore long-sleeved shirts with every inch of skin covered by fabric.
Oh, I thought, it might just be the usual, run-of-the-mill epidemic of colorism. I started asking questions, because I think it’s important to have that conversation and examine our value systems. I noticed I wasn’t getting a straight answer through the translator. People acted like they had no idea what I was talking about. When I finally met a blunt local teenager who could speak English, I jumped on the chance to ask about all the covering up.
“Oh,” she said immediately, “nobody wants to get darker.”
It was that simple. I could tell it immediately dawned on her that she’d just told a black person that nobody wants to get dark. So she switched to “they.”
“They want their color to be just like him,” she continued, pointing to a crew member traveling with me. “White.”
“So what happens if you happen to get dark?” I asked.
“Like the people who work in the fields?” she asked. “They think it’s ugly.”
It smacked me right between the eyes. “They think it’s ugly,” I repeated, letting the phrase hang in the air.
“Yeah, but if it’s vacation dark, it’s more like a sign of wealth,” she said. “If you’re just dark dark, it’s a sign that you’re poor and you work in the sun doing manual labor. And no one wants to be associated with that.”
I have now had these conversations with girls all over the world, from Asia to South America, Europe to Africa. When I am traveling, I see billboards on the streets with smiling light-skinned models promising the glory of brightening and lightening therapies. Take Fair & Lovely, an extremely profitable Unilever lightening cream that the company boasts has been transforming lives for the better since 1975. Sold in forty countries, this melanin suppressor is the best-selling “fairness cream” in the world. Seriously, Unilever says that one in ten women in the world use it. In India, the ads have changed with time from the original focus on getting a man—“if you want to be fair and noticed”—to becoming lighter in order to get a job. One career girl ends the commercial looking at her new face in the mirror. “Where have you been hiding?” she asks herself.
We’re right here and we’re hiding in plain sight.
“FOR A BLACK GIRL YOU SURE ARE PRETTY!”
This is the white cousin of “pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” To fully understand colorism, we have to acknowledge the root. Just as dark-skinned girls are often only deemed deserving of praise despite their skin tone, black women as a whole are often considered beautiful despite their blackness.
I have heard this often, coming from left field at work or meeting someone new. One time that sticks out was when I heard it in the parking lot of my twentieth high school reunion in Pleasanton a few years back. The guy was drunk and so was I, since I’d grabbed vodka as soon as I walked in to dull the effects of standing out so much. I wasn’t sure if it was my fame or my blackness that made everyone say, “Oh, there she is.” I had forgotten that long before I was ever on-screen, I already was famous in Pleasanton. I was the black one.
We were in the parking lot, figuring out where to go for the second hang. It was not lost on me that I was with the same crew that went to all the bonfires. The guy said it out of nowhere as if he perceived me for the first time and had to qualify his regard with a caveat.
“Why do you say, ‘for a black girl’?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He told himself, and me, that he just didn’t know black girls, so he was color-blind. The same way I had done when I was actually color struck. It was good to go back to Pleasanton and see that I wasn’t imagining what I felt as a kid. Once you’re an adult, you can read the room in the context of the larger world. For some of these people, and definitely this guy, I was still the only black friend they had. That twenty years during which they could have found at least one replacement for me? Yeah, they never got to it. I looked around at the people gathered, standing around just like we did at the bonfires. How many black people had these people ever had in their homes? Did they work with any at all?
That’s the thing, though. Having more black people around increases opportunities to learn and evolve, but that alone doesn’t undo racist systems or thought processes. That is the real work we all have to do. I always want there to be a point to what I am saying, and I don’t want to bring up the issue of colorism just to bring it up, or simply teach white readers about strife within the black community. At the very least, I of course want my friend to know she is not alone in her feelings about colorism. But I want to expect more than that. For years, we have advised women of color—light and dark—that the first step to healing is to acknowledge that colorism exists. Well, if we have hashtags about which teams people are on, black children staying out of the sun to avoid getting darker, and research studies that show the darker your skin, the greater your econom
ic disadvantage, then we know colorism is a fact. We’re ready for the next step, and we can’t shrink from it just because it’s hard and uncomfortable.
So let’s aim higher than merely talking about it. Let’s also expand that conversation beyond the black women who experience the damaging effects of colorism and stop telling them, “Love the skin you’re in.”
This cannot be a group hug of women validating women. Men must mentor girls as they grow into women, guiding them to find their own validation so they don’t seek it elsewhere in negative ways. Tell your daughter or niece she is great and valued not in spite of who she is, but because she is exactly who she is. Because dark skin and Afrocentric features are not curses. We are beautiful. We are amazing and accomplished and smart.
Okay, smart is never a given with anyone, but we are here. And we don’t need black ladies in airports and white guys in parking lots grading us on a curve, thank you very much.
nine
MISTLETOE GIRL #2 TELLS ALL
Ask any actor, and they will tell you the teacher who had the biggest influence on them as they crafted their technique. You’ll hear names like Stanislavsky, Strasberg, Adler, Hagen, and, of course, my own teachers, Screech and Mr. Belding.
I made my screen debut with two lines as Mistletoe Girl #2 on Saved by the Bell: The New Class. And, yes, I was in awe of Dustin Diamond, aka Screech, and Dennis Haskins, aka Mr. Belding. All the other kids on set were as green as I was, but these two were veterans as the only holdovers from the original show. In this room, they were stars.
The show taped in front of a live studio audience, but during rehearsals the studio was empty. So any scene I wasn’t in, which was the majority of them, I would go take a seat in the audience instead of going to my dressing room. I didn’t just watch Dustin Diamond and Dennis Haskins act; I studied how they interacted with the director and how they treated the rest of the cast and the crew. Dustin had been doing comedy for years, so he had this slapstick ability that he would reserve and then tweak for scenes. I didn’t realize that was a skill set you had to actually work at. Also, he was older than the teenagers on the show, and I knew I was going to be older than the people I was working with as long as I kept getting cast as a high schooler. Do you keep your distance as the adult? How much do you joke around? I literally just didn’t know anything. And Dennis was all about dirty humor as soon as work was done, so I definitely learned that you could choose who you wanted to be on set.
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