We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,42
to like other people. If I could truly love my own skin, then I was not going to see darker skin as a threat to my worthiness and my value. Then it was come one, come all.
Shortly after, I met my cousin’s former football teammate Marlin, whose nickname was literally Darkman. Marlin was midnight black, with a perfect smile and a gorgeous body. I met him at this massive sports bar called San Jose Live, and he had such enthusiasm about the music playing that with every new song he was like, “That’s my jam!” He was a hard dancer, meaning that you’d feel like a rag doll keeping up, but he was sweet. We ended up dating for two years, until I met my first husband and broke up with him. My first husband was chocolate brown, beefy, and covered in tattoos. He didn’t look like anyone I had dated, either.
When I got divorced and I went flying through my bucket list of dicks, they came in all shapes and sizes. This new approach was liberating. I felt open like a twenty-four-hour Walmart on freaking Black Friday.
Once I dated black men, I felt like I could breathe. Exhale and inhale deeply, without the anxiety of being examined by others to ensure that I was the “right kind of black” to even qualify to date interracially. When I dated nonblack men, there was always the Get Out fear of meeting their parents. My college boyfriend’s parents were nice to my face but called him a nigger lover and accused him of screwing up his life dating a black girl. Now I no longer had to endure the constant evaluations of my character, looks, and accomplishments from his friends and from strangers witnessing a white man being publicly affectionate with me. It drove me crazy to watch them look at us, puzzling out the equation of why I would be worthy of his touch. I could breathe.
I think that might be the biggest reason so many people root for me and Dwyane. He chose an undeniably black woman. When you have struggled with low self-esteem, to have anyone root for you feels good. To have women rooting for you who have been in your shoes and felt the pain you felt, feels likes a thousand little angel wings beating around you.
OF COURSE COLORISM ISN’T JUST CONFINED TO BEING AFRICAN AMERICAN. Or even American. In 2011, I went to Vietnam to film the Half the Sky documentary with Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the New York Times. We were there to delve into issues around education and young women, but when we landed, I immediately saw all these surgical masks. I wondered what I was walking into. Was there some kind of viral outbreak? If so, I was going to need one of those masks. It was also oppressively hot, yet people wore long-sleeved shirts with every inch of skin covered by fabric.
Oh, I thought, it might just be the usual, run-of-the-mill epidemic of colorism. I started asking questions, because I think it’s important to have that conversation and examine our value systems. I noticed I wasn’t getting a straight answer through the translator. People acted like they had no idea what I was talking about. When I finally met a blunt local teenager who could speak English, I jumped on the chance to ask about all the covering up.
“Oh,” she said immediately, “nobody wants to get darker.”
It was that simple. I could tell it immediately dawned on her that she’d just told a black person that nobody wants to get dark. So she switched to “they.”
“They want their color to be just like him,” she continued, pointing to a crew member traveling with me. “White.”
“So what happens if you happen to get dark?” I asked.
“Like the people who work in the fields?” she asked. “They think it’s ugly.”
It smacked me right between the eyes. “They think it’s ugly,” I repeated, letting the phrase hang in the air.
“Yeah, but if it’s vacation dark, it’s more like a sign of wealth,” she said. “If you’re just dark dark, it’s a sign that you’re poor and you work in the sun doing manual labor. And no one wants to be associated with that.”
I have now had these conversations with girls all over the world, from Asia to South America, Europe to Africa. When I am traveling, I see billboards on the streets with smiling light-skinned models promising the glory of brightening and