By Amanda Broyard Bonam
Light-skinned people have been in the news a lot lately. In case you missed it, I’ll offer a recap: Last month, Black Twitter had some thoughts about the trailer for ABC’s Black-ish spinoff comedy Mixed-ish. Singer Tory Lanez came under fire for his seemingly-staged charge against colorism. 2020 hopeful Senator Kamala Harris was accused of tokenizing her HBCU experience and Greekdom to pander to Black folks. Ayesha Curry, actress, cookbook author, wife of NBA star Steph Curry and matriarch of the very light-skinned Curry clan, appeared on The View where she discussed not feeling embraced by the Black community. While Curry has spoken out previously about feeling “too black for the white community, but not black enough for [her] own community”, in this latest appearance, she (cringingly) gave a call for the Black community to “embrace all shades.”
I am largely unqualified to write on colorism from a personal perspective—I’ve never really been subjected to it. However, as a fourth generation lightskin in a New Orleans Creole family of white-passing people, I feel amply qualified to write about life as a light-skinned Black person. And as a recovering tragic mulatto, I want to share how I am managing the same Tragic Mulatto Syndrome (TMS) that has befallen sister Ayesha.
As most modern-day tragic mulatto stories begin, I’ve always known I was Black but for much of my younger life I grappled with Blackness like a wet bar of soap. As a little girl with white skin, figuring out where and how I fit into Black spaces felt awkward at best and like a full-on internal crisis at my lowest teenage points. I imagine that if I had been asked in high school to craft a résumé listing my qualifications for Blackness, said résumé would be an embarrassingly ignorant sight to behold. It would probably list all of the stereotypes of Blackness that I could find applied to my life, while omitting entirely the various forms of privilege I hold (light-skinned privilege included).
My journey to recovery from TMS began at Howard University. My freshman year English professor, Dr. Eleanor Traylor, regularly opened class with a quote that the class recited with her: “Blackness has little or nothing to do with the amount of melanin in your skin. It has everything to do with assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization”. As a melanin-deficient 17-year-old girl in the throes of a racial identity crisis that burgeoned in high school, the quote brought me comfort and validation when I focused only on the first phrase. It has taken a few years of distance from the security of Howard’s campus, a bastion of Black validation, for me to reflect on what the words really mean. In turning them over and upside-down in my mind trying to apply the latter half to my life, I developed the following guide to rejecting light-skinned privilege.
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1. Recognize that you have it: Get a tall glass of the beverage of your choosing and swallow the pill of understanding that any teasing you may have experienced within the Black community for the color of your skin is not equal in severity to the racism that more melanated Black people face for their outward appearance in the wider world. Light skin is not systematically disenfranchised. Hollywood is still a light-skin-affirming industry. Mainstream makeup lines still carry your shade of foundation. The limited range of products in the natural hair section still work for your hair.
Police brutality overwhelmingly harms and takes the lives of darker-skinned Black folks. Recognize that your proximity to whiteness brings you closer to safety in encounters with state officials. Your experience of Blackness is valid but it is not universal. Pause and take account of the ways in which you benefit from being light skinned or otherwise racially ambiguous. Refill your glass and prepare to swallow the pill that you might even have white privilege in certain settings if you are not discernably Black—I do.
2. Keep it to yourself: While we fight for visibility for legitimate mental illness, I’ve found that modern-day Tragic Mulatto Syndrome (TMS) is best dealt with quietly and personally without turning to more melanated people for support. While I can’t be sure, I imagine that for a more phenotypically Black person, the feeling of listening to a light-skinned person complain about not feeling included must be not unlike the frustration of witnessing the co-opting of body-positivity, a movement designed primarily for the liberation of fat Black/POC bodies, by people with conventionally attractive physiques.Public discourse on systematic oppression should serve to amplify the experiences of those experiencing legitimate oppression.
Ayesha Curry’s use of a television platform to discuss Black people not embracing her also implied that it is incumbent upon dark-skinned people to embrace and interact with light-skinned people. It is not. Assuming that it is and consequently vilifying dark-skinned people broadly for not embracing you is not only problematic and annoying, it places a wedge between you and the rest of Blackness. While it is imperative that we work together as Black people to foster a more inclusive (queer and trans-inclusive, disability-inclusive, body positive) Black community, people who are much lighter than a brown paper bag must recognize that sometimes we look like the oppressor—we cannot ask dark-skinned people to sympathize with us for it.
3. Consider the way you self-identify: If you are multiracial, you have probably given considerable thought to balancing and honoring the racial identities of both parents. This is a largely personal process. For colored girls (and folks of all other gender identities) who have considered identifying as Black mixed with Native American or Creole when Blackness isn’t enuf—DON’T! Don’t fetishize your Ancestry DNA results. While it is possible and common to identify as both Black and mixed, it’s pretty great to identify exclusively as Black also. If you aren’t convinced that Blackness is something to be immensely proud of based on what we’ve overcome as a people, you should consider that having racially mixed DNA isn’t an achievement. You may have also neglected to consider the order in which you list your race amongst your other identities when self-identifying.
While your choice of how to identify is personal and is likely informed by the communities which have “embraced” you and which you’ve embraced in turn, understand that the way that you speak about your racial identity can alter the ways you’re perceived. You can other yourself in Black spaces by identifying as solely biracial. Dark-skinned Black people across cultures do not usually have the option to choose how they identify when it comes to race (it’s why this sketch on Donald Glover’s show, Atlanta, was hilarious and thought-provoking, and why Tiger Woods is a Black man no matter how Cablinasian he thinks he is). Making your Blackness an afterthought is a privilege that you should reject.
4. Avoid performative Blackness: Just be yourself. That’s universally good advice. If you didn’t grow up speaking AAVE, respect that it is not part of your identity and that using it could come at the risk of making you look uncomfortably phony.
5. Challenge colonized beauty standards: As a girl with 3C-textured curly hair and as the daughter of a Black mom who was raised on a lot of Southern respectability politics, I grew up understanding that straightened hair was presentable hair. I went to the salon regularly to have my hair “fixed.” The mainstream beauty industry is making more space for natural hair today but the space they’re making is mostly for people with curly hair like mine rather than for consumers with more melanin and afros.
I am a strong proponent of embracing and accentuating one’s Black features but recognize that even with my hair at peak voluminousness with my skin in its summer color, I am still not always assumed to be Black in the wider world. In the media and within the Black community, there are also privileges afforded to those with looser curl textures and whiter features. When possible and appropriate, reject compliments directed at the texture of your hair or the color of your skin (especially when they’re given in comparison to more phenotypically Black hair or skin).
6. Be an undercover brother (for the culture): This may seem somewhat antithetical to my above point but if you’re fair-skinned and/or racially ambiguous and aren’t known by your peers as someone who is vocal about race issues, making non-Black acquaintances who are comfortable enough to say racially problematic things in your presence has been a thing that’s happened to you. In middle school, during the 2008 presidential race, a white classmate (who is now married to a Black man *shrugs*), pulled me aside to share a joke about the various presidents featured on U.S. currency. The punchline was that President Obama, if elected, would be featured on the food stamp. I was stunned and couldn’t think of anything better to say in response than “I’m Black.” She turned red and explained that she always thought I was hispanic or mixed, clarifying further for me that she knew that the joke was racist and that it would not be an acceptable thing to say to a Black person.
She only said it to me because in her mind, I was safe.Educating people on their racial prejudice should not be the responsibility of an oppressed people though it generally is. If you recognize that you don’t face much if any oppression based on your looks alone, pay forward the coins of your privilege by calling out racist and bigoted thinking wherever it may be. Frustratingly, sometimes it will be less offensive to white sensibilities coming from you because of your proximity to whiteness.
7. Consider how much space you take up: There is not, nor has there been since the dawn of the 20th century, a shortage of light-skinned and white-presenting people leading the dialogue on the struggles of Black and brown people (W.E.B. DuBois, Angela Davis, Shaun King, Ben Jealous, Angela Rye, Lara Witt… the list is long). You should seize opportunities to use your voice to uplift and elevate Black and brown people but in doing so, you should be mindful that you aren’t taking the microphone from a more phenotypically Black person’s hands especially when they are speaking about their experiences in their skin.
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If you find that you’ve been tokenized for a conversation on diversity for example, recommend that the organizing agency also consult people with more “diverse” lived experiences than you (i.e. Black people with darker skin, QTPOC, Black people from other socioeconomic backgrounds). To amend a Shirley Chisholm quote, “If they give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair for someone who didn’t get an invite.”
The best metaphor on privilege that I’ve come across comes from my father: “White privilege is like riding a bicycle with the wind at your back. You don’t feel it while it is pushing you along. You may observe the trees and flowers swaying but don’t recognize the force with which it is helping you to move forward. It’s not until you have to ride into the wind and feel how it works against you that you see what a powerful thing it is.” Recognizing and rejecting privilege should not be an exercise of self-flagellation done in isolation but rather a habitual and lifelong mindfulness practice that is critical in helping all of us to move forward.
Reading Suggestions:
“The Tragic Mulatto Myth,” Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology, Ferris State University (2012)
“White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” Carol Anderson
Amanda Bonam is the founder of The Black & Project, an interview-based blog built to unpack the Black experience. She is a proud 2017 graduate of Howard University where she majored in Sociology with a research focus on Environmental Studies. She believes that the personal political and that all politics is local. At 19 years old, she served in local elected office in Washington, D.C. and has since worked in local government capacities in Washington, D.C. and her native New Orleans. She believes that putting sugar in grits is an abomination.
