Colorism

Light Girls Documentary - Click the link to watch Light Girls Documentary

Earlier this week the second part of the documentary Dark Girls came out. It was titled Light Girls, and it traveled through the history of lighter skin black women, the stereotypes, our standards of beauty, and the struggles of growing up a light skin woman. I found this documentary uncovering another part of my identity, because being an African American woman I never put myself in the category of light or dark skin. I just know that I am mixed with a variety of things; I didn’t know I would be a brown skinned girl, like everyone else we are the product of who made us.

 What if you were made by a slave master and a slave, you didn’t ask to be put here, but now you don’t fit anywhere. You can’t be white because you have black in your blood, but you aren’t fully black either.  I find it interesting to learn about the specific struggles lighter skinned women faced in the past. If you passed for white, you had the option to live a better life not having to worry about being killed or treated unfairly. But what if your parents were darker, your sister, or your brother? I think its interesting to wonder how many people from my parents generation don’t know they are black, because their parents married light to make sure they could live. You can’t have a relationship with your old family if you decide to live passing as white. Giving up your life to live is something I would find unbearable to do, but I do understand the objective was to live.

This documentary also made me think about the standards of beauty for African American women. What and who do we look to, because in the world we live in the lighter woman is always more glorified. But then you hear lighter women saying how they want to darken their skin, how they were called names like banana, vanilla, etc. The reverse is we have dark women wanting to bleach their skin to be lighter. We are always trying to find something to fix, something to improve, instead of just learning to be beautiful. These thoughts baffle me because being light or dark shouldn’t be a problem, and it shouldn’t define who is more beautiful or acceptable to the world. Stemming from this old beliefs we still have people put themselves on defense of one another because we label them as not looking black enough, or too black, and even going as far and saying you don’t sound black. I remember being picked on when I would go to Louisiana by my cousins, because I didn’t sound like a black girl, I was what they called a red bone, etc. Why as people do we have to find a way to discredit someone else to feel better about ourselves? We are all made up of the same cells, and when we die we will all rot the same way too.