Colourism and my personal experience with it…
“A Black woman was fair game for anyone at any time… She was considered less than a woman. She was a cross between a whore and a workhouse.”
Assata Shakur
I have stopped and started my posts on the topic of colourism several times because I have so much to say, so look out for my colourism series.
Over the course of the last two months, I have read two books that have changed my life completely. I would even almost call myself a revolutionary. “Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race” and“Assata Shakur An autobiography”. I highly recommend both of these books because I have witnessed a dramatic change in my thinking. I am not going to go into too much detail about either of these books because then I would be giving you book reviews and I want those to come later. I just want to give you insight on my personal experience with colourism.
“Black men internalised the white man’s opinion of black women.”
Assata Shakur
What is colourism?
The dictionary states that it is “prejudice or bias against persons on the basis of their skin colour or complexion, often among persons of the same racial identification.” I then asked some of my friends what their definitions were and they answered with:
“Discrimination amongst people of the same racial group due to misinformed and ill-educated interpretations of a skin colour.”
Anita Raymond
“An intergroup divide within the same ethnic community based on the various complexions of skin.”
Lesley Nganje
I agree with all these definitions as they all have the same underlying theme stating that it is between people of the same ethnic group or skin tone. However, I would say everybody’s own personal definition is specific to them. Throughout the stages of my life I have experienced colourism in several forms, without even realising what it was. The ultra sensitive society we live in today helps bring to light these issues and has helped me to put what I have experienced into words.
Growing up in South East London and on a multicultural estate, I was around people from all over the world ranging from Africa, Asia and all other Europe so I had never been exposed to the idea of racism, yet alone colourism. Every school I attended, I was one of many black people and this made me proud, proud to be african and proud to be black. I was hidden from the reality of life beyond South East London. This all changed when I moved away from London for a few years and to a small town called Green Bay.
Green Bay is a small town in the state of Wisconsin in the United states, known for nothing more than its football team. It is predominantly white so I was in for a shock. I was only eleven years old when I made the big move and didn’t have much expectation because I was sheltered for the first eleven years of my life. I can’t forget my first day, my aunt did some braids for me, I had a high school musical backpack and I was black. I remember entering the classroom and hearing shrieks, nobody expected the girl joining us from London to look like this. I wanted to shriek back, having come from being around fellow blacks in my learning environment to being the black sheep. To make matters worse, the other students kept making reference to the black girl in the classroom opposite mine, as if because of our skin tones we would automatically get along. Eventually, the other girl and I did become friends but she wasn’t my best friend. I made two best friends Molly and Alison and it was great. However, I had now come to a realisation of what my mum meant when she would tell me that this is ” not my country”. At just eleven years old I realised I would have to work twice as hard. I did and ended up being on the honour roll throughout my year there. I also won two spelling bees in a country that has different spelling to that of the United Kingdom so I was proud of that. I tried new things, I took swimming further and can swim like that of an olympian, I did jazz, tap and ballet dancing, I tried acting classes and I also learnt how to play the piano, this allowed me to be open minded. I was starting to see how it is to be black in white spaces.
The year soon came to an end and I moved from the suburb of suburbs to the hoodest of hoods, I found myself at complete opposite ends of the pole and having to adjust myself again. I moved to the Bronx in New York. It was the nicer area but the Bronx all the same. Here, my class was predominantly ethnic with loads of Black people, a few Latin/ Southern Americans and a few Asians. As usual, I adjusted and made some friends but for some strange reason, I still felt like I didn’t fit in. I thought the answer to my issues would be to move where I had others like myself but over half of my class were too intense for me, there would be a fight nearly every other day. When I say fight, I am not talking about when I was in primary school the year prior and this boy with anger issues in my class would flip the table. I am talking about someone call 999, because one person is going to end up dead kind of fights.
“Whew CHILEE THE GHETTO”
Luckily, due to my lovely nature I never got into any altercations. It was here though, that I started noticing colourism in full effect. I remember, there was a really pretty black girl who liked a Puerto Rican boy and he said he didn’t like her because she was ugly, she was far from. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder but she really wasn’t. I noticed that all the lighter skin girls would get most of the attention and the darker girls were always just the “cool friends” or “part of the gang”. I would just mind my business and observe. I wouldn’t entertain the thought of any of the guys because they weren’t it (ya’ll) but they taught me a lesson or two.
I stayed in New York for a year and a bit and came back to London where I started an all girls secondary school in Kent. There was a boys school down the road and after school we would all mingle around and wait for the boys to finish and I remember liking this boy, as in this was my first proper crush. I confessed my love for him to him and wanted to faint after. Every time this guy would say a word to me I would freeze and go mute. Long story short, after talking for a bit, he ended up saying I was “really pretty” but he has no feelings for me and went for a white girl a week later. This was around the time when every black boy decided that black girls aren’t for them and that we were “loud” ,”unattractive” , “look like duracell batteries with blonde hair”, etc. I moved on swiftly but for a long time in the back of my head, I thought that a guy is always going to choose a white or lighter skinned girl instead of me, even if he himself is black. I then told my mum that I was going to marry a white man because 1) black guys seemed to talk the most crud about us and 2) I had heard from various black women that they treat us better because if they can look past our blackness this means they truly love us. I was only fifteen when I jumped to this conclusion. I even remember asking my mum once, why she didn’t marry outside of her race because I would have been better looking and she replied saying “somebody wishes they could like you” *sips tea*.
Growing up black was hard, knowing you wouldn’t be picked immediately or getting backhanded compliments. I used to wear my real hair out loads and my hair is quite long, I would get asked if I was mixed to have such hair, as if my maternal grandma who is beautiful, dark and not mixed doesn’t have Rapunzel type hair falling to just above her bottom, I would get told that my nose is so cute and not wide and black and all these compliments that reduced my blackness and made me better according to european beauty standards. I began to feel above others for having more features that lean towards the European side.
Then one day all things changed and suddenly liking black girls was “cool again”. I then noticed that colourism within the black community was a trend. For black women we had to look a certain way and act a certain way to be acknowledged.
“I then noticed that colourism within the black community was a trend.”
In this post, I just wanted to give you insight into a bit of my background and my experience with colourism, as colourism is very personal and everybody has their own story. In posts to come we will delve into colourism in education, dating, media and I will post some other people’s opinions/experiences of colourism because I reached out to a few and asked them to send me some short pieces. This is just a snippet.
