RACISM | COLORISM | BLACK LIVES MATTER
Why is Colorism Still an Issue?
Edited excerpt of “Exploring Shadeism”
As the US and the world grapples with issues of racial justice, colorism — discrimination by skin shade — has also been in the spotlight. It’s a phenomenon I wrote about some time back in Exploring Shadeism. I looked at this mainly in the Barbadian and Caribbean context, and also did questionnaire research and interviews to find out about people’s lived experience of it. The following snippets give a flavor of the book:
The Context
In Western metropolitan centers where Black people are a minority within the population, they are often seen as one undifferentiated mass. Paul Gilroy asserts that “British racism has generated turbulent economic, ideological, and political forces that have seemed to act upon the people they oppressed by concentrating their cultural identities into a single powerful configuration.”
In other words, in the face of white racism, Black people of varying hues and national backgrounds have banded together to take on a single ‘Black’ identity. Indeed, the term…
