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.