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No, brownskin is a direct descendant of brownbone & dates back to early attempts to describe the range of skin tones present in Black American spaces. See also yellowbone & redbone. They were seen as better descriptions than octaroon or quadroon outside Louisiana. https://twitter.com/therealesohe/status/1336729544397623302
I'm in a car right now, but I have a slang dictionary that goes back to the 1800's that mentions the history. I'll try to find it later. Brownskin has come in & out of favor over the decades (brownbone gets confused with browbone easily) but it's older than Jim Crow
During & after slavery a lot of terms like mulatto, high yellow, quadroon & octaroon were replaced with terms like colored (hence the NAACP) & then replaced again as writers (largely Black) in the Harlem & Chicago Renaissance attempted to create a language for our bodies
So while colorism can certainly misuse anything, generally in any colonial culture there was a range of terms as descriptors that were offensive & eventually replaced or reclaimed, but for American Blacks in particular there was a concerted effort to reframe the language used
Botched the link somehow but brownbone was in use enough to show up as an Urban Dictionary entry 15 years ago
I knew there was a JStor link about color terms. The Journal of Negro Education talks about this in the 1940's. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2966307?seq=1
See also Irvin Miller's Brown Skin Models vaudeville show.
I just realized Brown Beauty Color, Sex, And Race never got linked & I blame my tired ass brain. https://www.amazon.com/Brown-Beauty-Color-Harlem-Renaissance/dp/1479802085
Looking for this reminded me that Zora Neale Huston was credited with introducing brown as a descriptor to replace colored by some historians. And I was pretty sure that wasn't totally correct, but I never got around to digging through the post slavery reconnection ads to be sure
I think the first written use of brownbone is in one of those ads. But I am not 100% certain. People trying to reconnect used a lot of descriptors like yellow or red in ways that were very different to how we might parse them now. (Yes, this was a topic I considered for a thesis)
Anyway I am soapboxing a bit, but all the terms we use around race & color have a history & sometimes it is a positive one. So I am not sure we can ascribe a blanket motive to term usage without considering how the terms may be passed down inside communities
