Colorism and Me: Confessions of a Walking Conundrum
“Mommy, do you hate yourself?”
My son Calvin was 6 years old when he skewered me with that question in the late 1990s.
While his youthful query surprised me, I knew what was behind it. He was trying to figure out why his very light-skinned, straight-haired mother with “racially ambiguous” features was always complaining about colorism despite the privilege it afforded me, him, and his little sister in many areas of life.
In addition to sitting through my explanations of colorism and light-skinned privilege, Calvin routinely witnessed me huffing, puffing, and fussing about colorist casting and storylines in the TV shows, movies, and advertising that dominate mass media and entertainment. He heard me discuss these topics passionately with friends, family, and colleagues. By 2000 he’d seen me onscreen as part of the groundbreaking Emmy-Award winning PBS documentary, “Black Women On: The Light-Dark Thang,” independently produced by the very talented Paula Caffey and Celeste Crenshaw.
My young son wasn’t the only one struggling to understand why any light-skinned person would rail against occupying a position of advantage in a racist and colorist world. This dichotomy between my phenotype and my politics has confused and frustrated many folks throughout the years.
Since I was in elementary school, I’ve grappled with the multifaceted impact of colorism and light-skinned privilege on my life, on people I love, and on the broader society. These issues have befuddled, angered, saddened, and frustrated me as far back as I can remember. Even before I fully understood or had the language or references to contextualize these things, they made me feel stress and physical discomfort. And I saw the ways that this ISM put us in conflict with each other.
I’ve often been criticized, ridiculed, and rejected for not buying into notions of light-skinned supremacy. The message was (and still is) clear: How DARE I turn my nose up at the advantages handed to me at birth!? I’ve been castigated as “a waste of all that yella” and denigrated as a fool including by my own father. All of which simply made me more determined than ever to fight this scourge.
Colorism is a hydra-headed monster that punishes, and privileges people worldwide based on the amount of melanin in their skin. At its core, the term—coined by literary supernova Alica Walker in the mid-1980s—is defined by Dr. Sarah L. Webb, founder and owner of Colorism Healing as “the social marginalization and systemic oppression of people with darker skin tones and the privileging of people with lighter skin tones.”
While ongoing public conversations about colorism have been happening for just a few years—made possible by the freedoms of social and digital media—colorism is a form of hierarchal oppression as old as, if not older than, racism.
How is colorism different from racism? While racism is interracial, colorism is both interracial and intra-racial, with People of the Global Majority often experiencing it most dramatically within their own groups. Yes, this ISM pollutes the entire planet. It is so deeply rooted and pervasive that it exists in majority-melanated cultures and countries where white folks aren’t even directly driving the dynamic.
One of the great tragedies of colorism is that we perpetuate this form of oppression against ourselves because that’s what we’ve been taught. We see and hear it so frequently that it’s become normalized. Fortunately, growing numbers of people are challenging, confronting, and working to heal from the ravages of colorism.
This isn’t an easy subject to address for any of us. But I am committed to exploring it responsibly and honestly, with the intention of creating the sense of wholeness that colorism has stolen from us for far too long.
For so many of us People of the Global Majority, colorism and its offshoots create a dangerous minefield of trauma, anger, abuse, resentment, guilt, shame, and angst. There is no comfort zone when it comes to this topic—especially given the scars we carry from the internalized white supremacist domination that provides fertile soil for colorism to thrive.
The answer to my son’s long-ago question is NO. I don’t hate myself, or the fact that I’m a Black-American Mixed race #BLEWISH woman with a body that triggers these tropes. And while the way I look always attracts undue attention and very strong, often extreme, reactions, I don’t hate it because key elders and artists taught me at a young age that my phenotype comes with a specific purpose for me to fulfill in this lifetime.
And doing this specific work is central to that purpose.
While I’ve publicly addressed colorism in my writing and been quoted in other folks’ books and articles on the topic throughout the years, it’s time to explore it in a more deep, direct, solution-focused way. I’ll be sharing varied view of folks across the melanin spectrum, along with resources to help all of us move towards a more healed and progressive way of thinking and being.
I hope and believe that if we build ways to face this ISM together, we can start healing the intergenerational trauma that keeps this form of self-hating pathology on loop.
I invite you to accompany me on this journey. As my favorite quote from Ancestor James Baldwin reminds us:
The conversation—and the struggle—will continue, right here on Mixed Auntie Confidential. Please join me—because facing it as a community is the only way out of this malevolent maze that traps so many and ruins countless lives.