Focusing on current ways in which skin color impacts the lives of blacks in America today, for example, consider the following:
To the extent blacks are represented in the most powerful positions in the United States, most in those leadership roles (CEOs and other corporate executives; federal and state government officials in the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and governors and mayors) are light in skin tone.
Tenured and tenure-track professors at universities throughout America, particularly elite ones, are more likely to be light in skin tone. Not only are darker-skinned blacks arrested and incarcerated at higher percentages, but they receive longer prison sentences for comparable offenses than lighter-skinned blacks and are more likely to be on death row for comparable offenses than lighter-skin blacks. Moreover, the “blacker” one’s features (skin color, hair, lips), the greater the penalty.
Dark-skinned blacks are more likely to be the victims of racial discrimination than lighter-skin blacks.
In the employment context, lighter-skinned blacks are both more employable and employed. Data on interviews and callbacks even demonstrate that lighter skin is preferred over academic credentials.
Lighter-skinned blacks are more prevalent in all forms of advertising (store advertisements, magazines, and billboards) and on television: as news anchors, as cast members in television shows, as dancers and love interests in music videos, and as actors in commercials.
Hollywood has long expressed its preference for light-skin women of color, and even today it is rare to find a dark-skin woman in a positive leading role or as a love interest.
Many of today’s successful entertainers— actors and actresses, singers and musicians— tend to be lighter, rather than darker, in skin tone.
Lighter-skinned blacks are often better educated, have higher occupational status (better jobs, careers, higher incomes), earn more money, have more overall wealth, tend to marry higher on the socioeconomic ladder, and are perceived as being more competent than darker-skinned blacks.
Lighter-skinned blacks, particularly females, are more likely to be married than darker-skinned blacks.
In nationwide beauty pageants, such as the Miss America Pageant, the rare black contestant and (even rarer) black winner have almost always been women with European features: light skin tone, keen features, and long, straight flowing hair.
In the adoption market, white children are preferred over nonwhite. When African American children are considered, there is a preference for light skin and biracial children over dark-skinned children. There is also a price hierarchy based on demand, with white children commanding top dollar, biracial children half as much, and black children being the cheapest. Parents have been known to request light-skinned child-care providers for their children.
Even in cases where the media has taken a lead role in exposing colorism, it paradoxically continues to broadcast its own preference for light skin tones. CNN, for example, has recently run a series of shows titled Who is Black in America and The State of Black America. Ironically, while many of the issues explored in these shows involved the preference for light skin over dark skin in black America, the shows were reported to the viewers by the very fair Soledad O’Brien. And, indeed, the overwhelming majority of the newsmen and women of color visible on CNN in 2012— Soledad O’Brien, Suzanne Malveaux, Tony Harris, T. J. Holmes, Don Lemon, and Fredricka Whitfield— are all people of color who are very fair in skin tone.Twenty-first-century doll tests, where white and black preschool and elementary school children are asked various questions about an array of colored faces on a palette placed in front of them, reveal overwhelming preferences for light skin and associate negative connotations with dark skin.
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