Denying your light skin privilege is harmful to the Black community as a whole |
Denying your light skin privilege is harmful to the Black community as a whole
Afropunk
2017-03-22
Erin White, Contributor
Atlanta, Georgia
Photo: PeopleImages / Getty
“Stop dividing us!” “We’re all black at the end of the day.” “There is no #TeamLightSkin/#TeamDarkSkin!”
Let’s cut the crap—nothing is as simple as “We’re all ______.” It’s nice to be reminded that we’re all in this together, human solidarity and back solidarity are beautiful things. They’re just not the only things. And when we don’t acknowledge the realities of the bad stuff, we let them fester and we leave others, the people we claim to be in solidarity with, more vulnerable.
People of color can never fully separate themselves from their race and what it signifies to ‘others’, of course, but let’s not pretend that light skin blacks do not receive privileges that are at the expense of dark skin blacks. Every hip-hop reference, every magazine cover, the ease of crossover success for the ambiguously brown while darker skinned folks (especially women) somehow seem largely underrepresented, and subsequently under-valued.
Society at large places a very high value on the perceived proximity to whiteness…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: AfroPunk, colorism, Erin White