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For this second week of #BHM 
, I'm sharing this article I wrote about the history of colorism in the United States. I wrote it for @guardian a few years back. Always amazes me where quotes of this turn up... https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/09/colorism-racism-why-black-people-discriminate-among-ourselves
, I'm sharing this article I wrote about the history of colorism in the United States. I wrote it for @guardian a few years back. Always amazes me where quotes of this turn up... https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/09/colorism-racism-why-black-people-discriminate-among-ourselves
Colorism was a word coined by Alice Walker to describe a phenomenon Black people and people of color had observed for centuries. Colorism often gets reduced to simplistic definitions or understandings, but it's more complicated than most admit
One of the complications--who is deemed "light" and "dark" is entirely dependent on in-group definitions. Despite social media and twitter's insistence, there really is a no hard and fast definition, often, for these terms...people view others as "darker' if they are w darker
skinned people and "lighter" with the more lighter skinned people they are around. "Light" and "dark" also have regional variations.
As others have pointed out, though, colorism can affect every aspect of life--from discipline received as a child to marriage prospects, earning potential, quality of health care and housing discrimination
In the 19th century, Black people used phrases like "colorstruck" to describe the phenomenon and there was an intense internal debate about whether colorism was "real" (sound familiar?) with lighter and white passing black political elites insisting it was not and
darker skinned writers and thinkers insisting it was. In this piece, I mention a Nannie Burroughs, a dark-skinned writer and intellectual who wrote passionately about colorism she experienced in DC's Black elite. In her writings, she noted
that DC's famous public school teaching class was colorist. Nearly all the teachers were light skinned or white passing--Burroughs was one of the few who was dark-skinned. Contrast her accounts with those of Alice Dunbar Nelson, who claimed dark-skinned teachers in Brooklyn
discriminated against her because she was white passing and that she found an easier time teaching in white schools (she was passing there too, hmm)...
I could go on. It's all there in the article. And, of course, colorism is a major theme of my new novel, LIBERTIE, out in March https://bookshop.org/books/libertie-9781432886530/9781616207014
excuse typos! sending these on the fly cuz the sitter is sick today 
