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 economic 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.