Colorism: The Unequal Racism
A discussion of being “of color” but not Black in America and abroad
I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time the day my classmate in graduate school told me she did not like Black people. I touched the dark hair I’d straightened that morning. I leaned forward to look more closely at my brown skin. I felt sick. I did not know what was worse: That someone white should so openly admit to their dislike — let me actually say hatred, for that is what it was — of one race, or that they should admit that hatred to me, a Person of Color?
I did not know then that that would be my first experience of colorism — a bias through which some people view and treat individuals with lighter skin more favorably than those with darker skin, yet I would experience it many times in my daily life, and each experience further drives home the message that I — a brown-skinned woman of non-African descent — would be given a “pass” for being of-color-but-not-Black.
That “pass” would put me in a separate category, a different kind of space with faux privileges. It is a space that affords me a simulated genteel and courteous treatment that may not be extended to many African-Americans. It’s a space in which people — not only white people, but from a range of racial backgrounds — feel comfortable sharing their views on African-Americans. It is a space in which the scion of a family of Louisiana senators once asked me out on a date, and told me that while I was too dark for his family, I was comfortably dark enough to indulge his fantasy of being with a Black woman.
It is a space where a man working behind the check-in counter at the airport of the Central Pennsylvanian town I live in gave me a “we’re on the same page” look as he roughly berated my elderly African-American friend for her excess luggage. It is a space where a cop driving down the street of the New Jersey town I once lived in stopped his car, got out, and for no apparent reason asked me “are you alright, Ma’am,” while looking pointedly at the young African-American man I happened to be chatting with.
This is not only a space that offers privilege due to lighter brown skin, it is an intersection where that privilege is at odds with antiblack racism. From that unique position, I’ve heard some things that are too vile to print. I’ve called many of them out — called out those who have the gall to presume I would collude with them in the way that I, had I been bolder at the time, should have called out my grad school classmate.
I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where skin color-based racism made no difference between shades of black and brown. Those who reviled color did so equally across the darker end of the spectrum, and in the Geneva of my childhood and adolescence, withering looks, disparaging remarks, racist slights, and slurs were meted out equally — and on a regular basis — to anyone of color. If anything went wrong in an apartment building, Black and Brown families were equal recipients of a concierge’s insults and ire. If a policeman boarded a bus in search of youngsters traveling without tickets, he was equally likely to zero in on a Brown or a Black youth.
On the streets of Geneva, skinheads with long-tailed rats on their shoulders and Swastikas tattooed onto their pates chased Brown and Black kids on their way home from school. In the fourth grade, kids refused to sit beside me and my Nigerian friend because they said our skin smelled like you-know-what. I still recall my mother’s tears when a paediatrician with ice-blue eyes warned her to keep me in check, for dark-skinned girls reached sexual maturity early. I was nine years old at the time. Just as Oprah was not served at a high-end handbag store in the city of Zurich, a salesperson not-so-kindly asked my mother and I to exit the luxurious Christian Dior boutique on Geneva’s fashionable Rue du Rhone, stating that it was not a store for people like us.
Such experiences weren’t limited to childhood and adolescence. At a café in my parents’ neighborhood with our then seven-year-old and rather rambunctious sons, my Rwandan friend and I were told to take our “monkeys” back to the jungles we’d come from and where they belonged. When returning to Geneva from Paris on the train a couple of years ago, a border guard detained me and a heavily pregnant West African woman. He took our phones and our passports and made us sit for more than two hours in a windowless waiting room.
Many Americans think highly of Europe, which the American liberal media extols for its progressive views and policies. Just as many Europeans I know seem to believe that racism is purely an American phenomenon, since transatlantic slavery — which was actually started by Europeans — lasted longer in the U.S. than in any other part of the western world, and racism in America is arguably much more visible on a global scale. But so many People of Color in Europe battle racism on a daily basis, on the street and otherwise.
According to statistics compiled by the Swiss Federal Commission against racism, the greatest number of reported racist incidents in the country I grew up in occur in public areas, in the workplace and in neighborhoods. Throughout her tenure, Italy’s first Black minister for integration, Cecile Kyenge, endured a ceaseless torrent of the most vile kind of racist abuse. While covering the 2008 European cup final in Poland, well-known British sports journalist Mihir Bose, who is himself of Indian origin, was told by authorities that because of the color of his skin, they could not guarantee his safety in more than two or three stadiums.
The rise of right wing ideology in European politics is worrisome — all the more so given the stark whiteness of both European governments and the institutions of the European Union despite the presence of five generations of People of Color in most countries, and the fact that discussions on race, racism and white privilege have yet to make it to the mainstream. France, for example, requires a very high standard be met before a crime can be put forward as racially biased, and that determination is made by a police officer at the early stages of an investigation.
Immigration into Europe has been historically tight and strictly regulated, even as European countries have always done their fair share in taking in refugees. I recall as a teenager, Switzerland took in the first of the Tamil refugees from the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. But it’s been argued that the advent of the borderless Schengen Zone and, more recently, the mass migrant crisis that began in 2015, have fuelled nationalist sentiment and increased xenophobic attitudes.
In a June 6 article published in the New York Review of Books, Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in the U.K., makes the illuminating point that many liberal Europeans regard racism as something uniquely and atrociously American, something that doesn’t exist in Europe. There is in Europe, he says, a “moral confidence that conveniently ignores both its colonial past and its own racist present.” It’s fueled by an indignation sparked in part by the viral videos of police shootings and brutality in the U.S., and it is couched in the particular disdain Europeans have for America’s gun culture, and in the general anti-American sentiment that prevails throughout Europe.
I do hope, though, that the protests happening in many European countries following the murder of George Floyd include a greater awareness for the many Brown and Black people who seek to draw attention to racism broadly, including interpersonal, community, institutional, and racial profiling by law enforcement that in more cases than we know, does result in police brutality. The anti-racism/Black Lives Matters protests taking place in my hometown of Geneva and other Swiss cities are reportedly pivoting around the case of a Nigerian man who died in February 2018 after being immobilized face down own by police in the neighboring city of Lausanne.
The many racist incidents we experience in the west create an often uneasy, sometimes unspoken bond between People of Color. I shared that bond with my fourth grade classmate and have shared it with many others over the years. That bond is the reason why my mother patiently waits for the same Black cashier at the supermarket she’s shopped in for the past forty years. It is a bond that I share with my African-American friends, a bond that offers comfort, that provides security — particularly in places where there are few of us and where it can feel as though we’re walking on borrowed ground.
In my lifetime, I believe this is the first time that racism has been called out to this degree in the western world, and by so many people. Even the smallest racist act feeds into a broader system and keeps it going. We need to keep up the momentum and put an end to that, to fight against deep-rooted institutional inequalities. And here in the U.S., I believe that we Brown people of non-African descent have a key role to play in dismantling a system that metes out unequal racism, that lets some people pass while reserving its very worst for others. I hope that we do not lose sight of that, because until now, the solidarity we should have always had with African-Americans has never gained the momentum it should have.
In part, because of the unspoken rule of thumb that the closer a Person of Color can get to white — and barring the exceptions given to the athletes, the artists, and the affluent — the better off they will be in a predominantly white society, I myself am guilty through my actions of attempting to “whiten” myself to fit in. I have almost always straightened my hair. When I was growing up I consciously distanced myself from my origins by denigrating my Indian heritage and background and embracing the idea of western cultural superiority. My European education — which includes fluency in French and other languages — has given me a veneer that further masks my skin color and lends a legitimacy to my “pass.”
But the trappings we acquire are one thing. There exists among many non-Black People of Color a conscious desire to be accepted as white — a desire that has its roots in within our own communities. For South Asians, nothing has greater value than fair skin. Light skin is often a woman’s only capital — her chance to marry better, her parents’ chance to pay less in dowry. Those who are born with it are always better off, those who don’t have it suffer. The humiliation and injustices experienced by lower caste women are heartbreaking. Darker skinned women are taught from a young age to hide their true color to the best of their ability while working furiously to change it — using everything, depending on socio-economic status, from kitchen counter concoctions, to expensive skin lightening creams made in Japan and South Korea, and a plethora of cheap-yet-noxious cottage industry-type products. The rejection of brownness in my community exists even at the highest echelons of society and is further propagated via magazines promoting Eurocentric standards of beauty that include encouraging Indian women to get a tan in the summer.
Sadly, though, the aspiration to get closer to whiteness goes hand-in-hand with the twin aspiration of distancing from blackness to the greatest extent possible — a dynamic that has been, in part, fueled by the largely inaccurate myth of Black criminality that has spread and persists throughout the Brown world as well. But as we continue to perpetuate colorism within our own communities while quietly accepting the brown privilege extended to us by a white majority, we are just allowing a system that in any case spares us the very worst of its institutionalized injustice and brutality to continue unchecked. Accepting that privilege while continuing to practice colorism in our own communities preserves the unfounded tenets of the pseudo-science of race that divided People of Color in the first place, that allowed colonialism to flourish and that enabled the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Worse yet, it allows slavery’s ignoble legacy to survive.
