We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,43

lightening therapies. Take Fair & Lovely, an extremely profitable Unilever lightening cream that the company boasts has been transforming lives for the better since 1975. Sold in forty countries, this melanin suppressor is the best-selling “fairness cream” in the world. Seriously, Unilever says that one in ten women in the world use it. In India, the ads have changed with time from the original focus on getting a man—“if you want to be fair and noticed”—to becoming lighter in order to get a job. One career girl ends the commercial looking at her new face in the mirror. “Where have you been hiding?” she asks herself.

We’re right here and we’re hiding in plain sight.

“FOR A BLACK GIRL YOU SURE ARE PRETTY!”

This is the white cousin of “pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” To fully understand colorism, we have to acknowledge the root. Just as dark-skinned girls are often only deemed deserving of praise despite their skin tone, black women as a whole are often considered beautiful despite their blackness.

I have heard this often, coming from left field at work or meeting someone new. One time that sticks out was when I heard it in the parking lot of my twentieth high school reunion in Pleasanton a few years back. The guy was drunk and so was I, since I’d grabbed vodka as soon as I walked in to dull the effects of standing out so much. I wasn’t sure if it was my fame or my blackness that made everyone say, “Oh, there she is.” I had forgotten that long before I was ever on-screen, I already was famous in Pleasanton. I was the black one.

We were in the parking lot, figuring out where to go for the second hang. It was not lost on me that I was with the same crew that went to all the bonfires. The guy said it out of nowhere as if he perceived me for the first time and had to qualify his regard with a caveat.

“Why do you say, ‘for a black girl’?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He told himself, and me, that he just didn’t know black girls, so he was color-blind. The same way I had done when I was actually color struck. It was good to go back to Pleasanton and see that I wasn’t imagining what I felt as a kid. Once you’re an adult, you can read the room in the context of the larger world. For some of these people, and definitely this guy, I was still the only black friend they had. That twenty years during which they could have found at least one replacement for me? Yeah, they never got to it. I looked around at the people gathered, standing around just like we did at the bonfires. How many black people had these people ever had in their homes? Did they work with any at all?

That’s the thing, though. Having more black people around increases opportunities to learn and evolve, but that alone doesn’t undo racist systems or thought processes. That is the real work we all have to do. I always want there to be a point to what I am saying, and I don’t want to bring up the issue of colorism just to bring it up, or simply teach white readers about strife within the black community. At the very least, I of course want my friend to know she is not alone in her feelings about colorism. But I want to expect more than that. For years, we have advised women of color—light and dark—that the first step to healing is to acknowledge that colorism exists. Well, if we have hashtags about which teams people are on, black children staying out of the sun to avoid getting darker, and research studies that show the darker your skin, the greater your economic disadvantage, then we know colorism is a fact. We’re ready for the next step, and we can’t shrink from it just because it’s hard and uncomfortable.

So let’s aim higher than merely talking about it. Let’s also expand that conversation beyond the black women who experience the damaging effects of colorism and stop telling them, “Love the skin you’re in.”

This cannot be a group hug of women validating women. Men must mentor girls as they grow into women, guiding them to find their own validation so they don’t seek it elsewhere in negative ways. Tell your daughter or niece she is great and valued not in spite of who she