Colorism, racism’s neglected half-sister, has historically been a second-class issue in the social justice sphere. It rarely gets the spotlight, yet is responsible for a good deal of internal hatred and bickering within the black community.
It’s partly why I left the Democratic Party three years ago: I was neither black enough nor Hispanic enough nor feminist enough to take up the struggle against injustice.
There’s such a focus on racism and police brutality, but the internal problems that promotes division and prevent presenting a united front to achieve greater opportunities are lower on the priority list. Colorism—prejudice against a person who has one black parent and another parent of a different ethnic origin—is one of these issues.
Technically, there are two working definitions of colorism. One is the perceived benefits that lighter-skinned black people received in society compared to darker-skinned black people. In a paper published by Mills College professor Margaret Hunger, she makes the claim that “[l]ighter-skinned people of color enjoy substantial privileges that are still unattainable to their darker-skinned brothers and sisters. In fact, light-skinned people earn more money, complete more years of schooling, live in better neighborhoods, and marry higher-status people than darker-skinned people of the same race or ethnicity.”
The other definition is the prejudice that light-skinned black people experience in this country because of their assumed higher status. And this definition is swept under the rug. In a video shared by the Huffington Post two years ago, renowned public speaker Iyalana Vazant expresses genuine surprise that light-skinned black people can be called racist names like “monkey” in addition to being called “high yellow” and “redbone” within the black community. The conventional narrative goes that only white people use racist terms.
Of course, there are disgusting racist caricatures of dark-skinned black people, and racist attitudes and biases persist to this day. But you couldn’t get away with calling a dark-skinned person a Sambo in 2016. Or running an ad with a dark-skinned person with exaggerated lips next to a watermelon.
But calling someone a tragic mulatto? White chocolate? Accusing someone of betraying their race because they are not marrying a black person? That’s fair game in 2016. And it shouldn’t be. People should be held accountable for their hatred, no matter who they are.
This week, my Twitter timeline was evidence that supports the theory that colorism is alive, well, and socially acceptable. I mentioned in passing that I hadn’t been accepted as a young biracial woman, and that simple innocuous statement unleashed hell from a Twitter troll determined to prove that I deserved to be bullied and excluded. She insisted that my experience was not at all race related and that I was just being a crybaby. “You really riding that tragic mulatto all the way to the end, huh?” she tweeted to me.
I realized that I was being dragged into an unfair fight. She felt she had the right to “check” me, but if I pointed out her aggressive and inappropriate behavior was just a fulfillment of the overused Angry Black Woman stereotype, I would have been shredded to pieces. As it was, this woman would not back down from her position that it was my personality that merited ire, as a child and now.
“Stop othering yourself,” she barked at me in response to my complaint that I had been ostracized as a child for my lighter-colored skin. “You black right? Then chances are your family raised you diff [sic] than the kids that called u names.”
When my fiancé came to my defense, she insulted him too.
“Tragic mulatto savior on deck,” she sneered. She told him to save his “whitesplaining” for me, his “white chocolate” (she delete those tweets) and suggested he call me that name in bed. She accused us of not giving a damn about black children unless we adopted some. It was as surreal as it was vile. She told me that I was “yellow wasted” (slang for an unattractive light-skinned black person) and that Idisproved the assumption that light-skinned black people were more attractive. Good grief. I had never said I thought I was more attractive, or better. That was something she had assumed about me, which she admitted she had learned from her grandmother. Negative assumptions about light-skinned black people are as old as slavery, and began with the miscegenation during the slave trade.
Colorism has roots in the colonial era, when white slave traders or slaveowners would rape slaves and produce lighter-skinned children. Thought to be more prized than dark-skinned slaves, they were thought to have been given less strenuous work and were treated more favorably than “field slaves”. One of most well-known mixed race slaves was Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s mistress with whom it was rumored they had six children.
But light-skinned slaves were still slaves. They were still property that could be bought and sold.
And I’m still black. Even though I’m half Hispanic, that doesn’t change the fact that people who looked like me were bought and sold, and are subjected to prejudices today. I’m proud of who I am and what I’ve become. But I have no illusions about who I am and what that means.
