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Culture August 30, 2017
This is what happens when you're biased towards your own community.
Photo by Franzi via ShutterstockMy parents couldn’t have ever prepared me for what I faced in middle school as an immigrant from Iran. In my predominantly white middle school, children ruthlessly bullied the Persian students with darker skin tones. People immediately assumed we were snobby, annoying, unattractive, unintelligent and money hungry – you know, just to list a few.
I often got called names like “hairy monster,” and my skin color became the butt of jokes among white kids. And while I sat in class crying, my classmates laughed at me until their stomachs hurt.
Boys would turn to me in class and comment on my thick eyebrows and hair on my upper lip. In other instances, my skin tone gave my peers a reason to call me a terrorist. I was a 12 year old Persian Jewish girl attending school in L.A., but my dark skin tone gave children a reason to physically abuse me and justify it by calling me a terrorist.
It was a struggle me and my Muslim best friend never stood up against. I was from Iran, and she was from Bangladesh. Neither of our countries was involved in terrorism in America, but our darker skin tones labeled us as people who would bomb cities to incite fear. But the other Persian students with fair skin never went through the same abuse. They never made to feel less than by being compared to hateful and violent people.
My skin tone made me an “other,” and that gave children a reason to put me down to feel better about themselves.
This is when I became hyper aware of my skin color. It started to affect how I view my own worth. At first, I assumed this disgust towards my culture came from the many stereotypes of Persian people in L.A. But, I slowly realized that people only saw my skin color and nothing more. It didn’t matter where I came from. As long as I had dark, olive skin and dark curly hair, I was ugly.
Persian girls who had fair skin, on the other hand, were deemed beautiful and popular.
And to make matters worse, these insults and comments came from my own community as well. My own friends and family only complimented me when I straightened my hair and stayed out of the sun.
Why does this happen? Well, colorism.
Colorism is the principle that people of color with lighter, fairer skin are afforded more privileges than people of color with darker skin tones. But, it’s also a lot more complex than this. It doesn’t mean people of color with fair skin don’t deal with their own struggles and prejudices. They do.
But since it can get confusing, we’ve broken it down for you.
According to TIME, colorism isn’t an official word. It doesn’t appear in the dictionary.
In fact, Alice Walker was the first person to use the term. In her novel, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” Walker describes colorism as a “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.”
While two people may be from the same race, the way people treat them is also based on the lightness of their skin. It exists within most minority communities and all over the world, including Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Africa.
History has shown that people with lighter skin tones are known to be favored over people with darker skin tones. According to NPR, during the time of slavery, masters allowed Black people with lighter skin to work in the house but forced Black people with darker skin to work in the fields.
“This evolved into generations of Blacks, both consciously and subconsciously, teaching themselves that one is better than the other which eventually led to a billion dollar fake hair industry,” NPR writes.
Colorism isn’t exactly racisim, but it is a systemic issue.
Author of the book, “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives,” Shankar Vedantam told The New York Times about the inherent bias towards people with lighter skin.
He defined colorism as “an unconscious prejudice that isn’t focused on a single group like Blacks so much as on lBlackness itself. Our brains, shaped by culture and history, create intricate caste hierarchies that privilege those who are physically and culturally whiter and punish those who are darker.”
Vedantam continued to explain how Latinos with lighter skin tones in the United States make $5,000 more on average than Latinos with darker skin tones.
He also explains that colorism is an intra-racial and inter-racial issue. Studies show African-American defendants with darker skin tones are twice as likely to receive the death penalty than African-American defendants with lighter skin tones for crimes with equivalent seriousness.
On an episode of “Oprah’s Lifeclass,” a woman named Iyanla Vanzant talked with Oprah about colorism and the discrimination she faces as an African-American woman with a darker skin tone. And then, two of Oprah’s audience members stood up to tell Vanzant about the problems they face as African-American women with lighter skin tones.
One woman stood up and said, “Being a light-skinned girl, you get called names,” she said. “You get called ‘lite-brite,’ you get called ‘high yellow,’ ‘redbone.’ This is a reality every day.”
She continues, “You’re alienated from your own people. You’re never black enough,” she said. “But we’re still black in America. None of us feel advantaged.”
African-American people with lighter skin tones don’t feel the “advantage” they may have because they’re essentially ostracized from their own communities.
Drexel University assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies Yaba Bla talked to Ebony about the issue of colorism and how to fix it. Bla explained that to overcome colorism and to start loving your own skin, the discussion needs to stray away from how to fight white supremacy and focus on how to control our participation within a society where only Eurocentric features are viewed as beautiful.
Bla says, “It’s about learning how to ask different questions. We can’t ever stop talking about colorism. We have to stop internalizing and imploding and start holding other people accountable.”
Bla explains that colorism doesn’t just come from preference. She explains, “On the one hand, we talk about this age old cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but who is training that eye? You got that from somewhere.”
Once we stop teaching children that lighter means better, we can begin eliminating this systemic issue.
It’s been years since I’ve been around the same students who bullied me, but those comments haven’t stopped. What has stopped is my passiveness. It’s taken about 10 years for me to learn to love everything about myself. I wasn’t brave enough to speak up for myself back then, but I am now. By speaking up, I remind myself that I don’t deserve the abuse that comes from someone else’s inherent bias against me. It’s an uphill battle, but I’m training myself to not allow my skin tone define me.
My friends and I stayed out of the sun to avoid getting darker. People bullied us for our skin tone. So, we convinced ourselves that lighter meant better. But, understanding that my skin tone made me unique and beautiful was the first step towards loving myself. Someone had to teach me that.
And if everyone just learned to focus on the root of these issues, we can finally start eliminating the factors that continue to divide us.
