1. Adrian Piper notes in “Passing for White, Passing for Black” that lighter skinned ex-slaves were trained in specialized skills during slavery and able to get better jobs after slavery and therefore were able to ascend to the middle class faster/develop their own middle class. Darker skinned ex-slaves were left to labor and domestic jobs. I think that explains why it seems darker skinned Blacks haven’t gotten seats at the table so quickly as a whole/as a majority. I also wonder how we fix this obviously historic systemic oppression.
Even in my family, the disparity is obvious. On my mother’s side (my light side), I am technically a legacy at Penn, even though my mom is from the projects of southeast DC. I have an ancestor with the last name Claytor (her father’s last name) who got a Phd in mathematics there back in the early 20th. c. He had wavy hair and seemingly light skin. On my father’s side (my darker side)*, and especially via his last name, I’m probably first generation Ivy League, I’m first generation Master’s degree, undergraduate degree and one of the first who really even left the south comfortably.* On my mother’s side, my late uncle was also an artist (though he never left the experimenting/learning phase) and had a degree in mathematics, and when he served and traveled to Italy for the military, he came back with a small copy of Rodin’s The Thinker. On the other hand, my father (also deceased), while arguably brilliant, dropped out of high school and did night school to get his GED and be an electrical engineer. Although he bought me paintings of Black ballerinas as a child, he also told me Black people don’t study art.
2. It is unfair that darker skinned Black people aren’t encouraged as much, are policed more (especially in educational spaces) and underestimated. Colorism in America is historic and it affects one’s quality of life. For many, it determines how hard they’ll have to work to survive. I’m not okay with it. I’m also not okay with how often I am the darkest person in a space.
3. I went to a Barnes & Noble this fall and as I checked out the magazine stands, I began to notice a pattern. Kerry Washington (who I am fairly close in complexion to) was the darkest Black american woman on a cover and every other Black american woman who wasn’t light skinned seemed to be her complexion. I’ve started to notice that on TV women do not get darker than Kerry Washington, with the exception of Michaela Pratt on HTGAWM and Stephanie Edwards on Grey’s Anatomy*.
In DC, a friend once told me, “You are the brown paper bag”. He was much darker than me and it was summer and I was beginning to tan. I keep a brown paper bag in my studio, so I know he is wrong, I am definitely darker than the literal brown paper bag but his observation was still accurate. In 2016, liberalism totes my complexion as diversity, as inclusive, but liberal media gets a little too excited and all of a sudden we just have a new color line. Now, you don’t have to look like Beyonce or Dorothy Dandridge (in hair type and complexion) to be considered beautiful in a mainstream (white) context, but you can’t be much darker than Rihanna and they’d prefer if you looked like you could be from “anywhere” and that your hair curls up “nicely” when wet unless you’re okay with wigs and sew-ins. It’s a problem. We need real Black diversity rainbows that show our RANGE from lightest to DARKEST and also that show an array of phenotypes and it would be really great if we prioritized AFRO phenotypes as the standard, not the exception.
The faces our media prioritizes are the faces people prioritize because they’re the faces you see the most ambiently as media permeates our world.
*To clarify: My father’s father was very dark skinned and from the Carolinas, his father (my great grandfather) was a sharecropper. However, my father’s mother and her whole family were lighter skinned (not one-drop like my mom, but clearly part Indigenous peoples and lighter than the brown paper bag, like my mother’s family) and they owned property in DC through my grandparents (who I never met bc my dad was also very old when he had me) until I think the 1970’s or 80s. The main difference between my father’s mother and my mother is that my mother’s family has more white blood it seems. My grandmother (my father’s mother) was very proper and my darker skinned father couldn’t deal and left home early, starting his life on a very different path. His mother, like my mother, had a failed relationship with his darker skinned father.
*If there are others, I never met them, they are unknown to me.
*please send me more examples if you know of any Black women actresses darker than Kerry Washington.
*Viola Davis is obviously the exception to all of these rules but SHE WENT TO JUILLIARD, meaning she is very excellent and has had SUCH A LONG CAREER BEFORE GETTING HERE (AND BLESS HER)! Taraji P. Henson (also about Kerry Washington’s complexion) didn’t have to go to Juilliard. No shade to Taraji because her accent sounds like my mom’s and she’s from DC and I love her. AND IT STILL TOOK TARAJI LIKE 20 years to be famous. She had her breakout role in 2001 in Baby Boy and I saw that movie a million times and even I am guilty of not knowing her name until Empire.
*also forgot to mention that Shonda Rhimes, a darker skinned Black woman, is responsible for most of the darker skinned Black women on television. We are left to constantly do the work for ourselves.
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