We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,40
burden. They were called piss colored and listened to chants of “light, bright, and damn near white.” My mother told me that she married a darker-skinned black man because she didn’t want her kids to have “light-skin problems.” I can imagine my grandmother’s face when Mom brought home Cully Union.
My mother felt the burden, but I witnessed the privilege. Inheriting my father’s skin, but growing up in proximity to my mother’s lightness and to the lightness of my cousins, I saw how people across the whole color spectrum responded differently to them than they did to me. In my view, there was simply no comparison in our plights. It was impossible not to grow to resent that.
We darker girls should not be pitted against our lighter-skinned sisters, but our pain at being passed over also shouldn’t be dismissed by people saying, “Love the skin you’re in.” You can love what you see in the mirror, but you can’t self-esteem your way out of the way the world treats you. Not when we are made to feel so unloved and exiled to the other end of the beauty spectrum.
I e-mailed a young friend of mine telling her that I wanted to write about colorism. She replied immediately. “Sometimes it makes me feel crazy,” she told me, “because when I bring up the issue it’s met with confusion or disbelief.” This gorgeous young woman blessed with darker skin had tried to self-esteem herself into fulfillment for years, but her experience with colorism left her feeling hopelessly alone. My friend had no problem getting a date, but finding amazing black men who truly love darker-skinned women proved to be a challenge. “The truth is, there are just certain men that are not and will never check for you,” she says. “At least not seriously.”
Perhaps more isolating, whenever she has raised the issue of colorism with friends or men, she is told that she is creating and encouraging division within the community. “People tell me I’m just imagining these feelings,” she said; they think she’s exaggerating the effects of colorism she experiences professionally and socially.
She’s not. She is not imagining this shit, and she is not alone. For decades, sociologists like Margaret Hunter have collected real empirical evidence that we are color struck. Darker-skinned people face a subset of racial inequalities related to discipline at school, employment, and access to more affluent neighborhoods. In one study, Hunter found that a lighter-skinned woman earned, on average, twenty-six hundred dollars more a year than her darker sister. In her 2002 study of the color stratification of women, Hunter also presented real statistical evidence showing that light-skinned African American women had “a clear advantage in the marriage market and were more likely to marry high-status men than were darker-skinned women.”
I have my own case study. My first husband was dark skinned, and I was the darkest-skinned woman he ever dated. Once he got a little success in football, he told me, “I wanted the best.” What he considered the best, a sign that he had “made it,” was dating light-skinned girls. It showed he had the ability to break through class and color barriers. He chose to marry me because I was famous and had money. For him, that trumped color.
“The number-one draft pick or the up-and-coming action hero will never choose me, because I’m dark skinned,” my friend said. On the other hand, she has sometimes felt fetishized by men who briefly date her solely for the visual. “After Lupita got big, I noticed it was trendy to like me,” she said. “On that note, white men love me. It’s almost like a validation for them. ‘Look at this black woman on my arm, natural hair, black skin, natural ass . . . See, I’m down!’
“It’s hard to gauge who really likes me,” she continued, “and who just wants to use me as an accessory. I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m not worthy, so when someone says that I am, it feels like a setup.”
When black men are just honest with me, they admit that their vision of success most often does not include expanding on their blackness. “It’s lightening up my gene pool,” one guy boldly told me. “If I have a baby with you, we’re gonna have a black-ass baby.” When Serena Williams, whose fiancé is white, announced her pregnancy, a light-skinned black guy with twenty-one thousand followers announced on Twitter: “Can’t blame her for needing a lil’ milk in her coffee to offset