Why does it appear that all over the world people have a propensity to equate lighter skin to having a greater aesthetic quality? You see it everywhere from pop icons like Beyonce and Nicki Minaj who noticeably have become lighter over time, to advertisements and commercials who choose lighter, more fair skinned individuals to market their beauty products. All across the world, we see displays for norms that play into the public's imagination, setting the "tone" for a lighter reality.
Photo: Straightfromthea.com
For many darker skinned individuals like myself, the feelings of inferiority are often innate. I remember as a child being love stricken with a girl only to find out that she "didn't like dark skin boys". This provoked many questions into my young inchoate mind, questions like; is being dark ugly? Is there something uniquely basic about it? For many, slavery embedded an indelible mark on African Americans that precipitated an intrinsic self-hate that burgeoned across generations to come. In many instances, slave masters set the stage for battles between light skinned and dark skinned slaves, but again, the question arises; is being dark ugly? Historically this isn't true at all, in fact having lighter skin meant that you were sick or had a disease. As mentioned before, this is a global phenomenon and while African Americans see this distinction most palpably, it is not only found within the community.
One reason we have a tendency to see beauty idealistically as lighter is because most of our world's societies come out of both feudalistic and peasant traditions. Historically peasants worked outdoors and subsequent to this, they became darker in skin tone. Being wealthy meant that you could keep your women and children indoors never having them subject to the conditions of outside work. This was an extraordinary, tremendous sign of status, that only the wealthy could monopolize; thus leading to anachronistic norms with a historical preoccupation of fair skin that's very important in many cultures like in India, China, and North America. Don't be fooled either, colorism is just as endemic when it comes to men. A 2006 University of Georgia study showed that employers prefer light-skinned black men to dark-skinned men, regardless of their qualifications. The data found that a light-skinned black male can have only a Bachelor’s degree and typical work experience and still be preferred over a dark-skinned black male with an MBA and past managerial positions. Also, if we think parenthetically the commencement of social media and the new world of filters also speaks to the condition that certain groups of people have in lightening up the way they look to appear more aesthetically qualitative.
In closing, I believe we have to have a deeper, more engaging conversation on shaking up societies norms in what it means to be beautiful, in this manner at least "shining light" on the subject matter isn't a pejoratively negative thing.
