Why the obsession with lighter skin?

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty. A surge of love and understanding swept through him, but was quickly replaced by anger. Anger that he was powerless to help her. Of all the wishes people had brought him — money, love, revenge — this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” — Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Dencia is a Nigerian pop star who is becoming better known for her skin cream, Whitenicious. The product sold out within 24 hours of its release.
The singer has been criticised both for promoting the dangerous practice of skin bleaching, and for her appearance in the accompanying advertisement to the right, where she appears to have either been photoshopped white or undergone radical skin bleaching, or both. (Let’s not even start on the blond wig … *sigh*)
The popularity of Whitenicious is not surprising given that 77 percent of Nigerian women (and many men) use some form of lightening product. Sadly, Nigeria is not alone in its increasing intolerance towards darker skin tones. Skin lightening potions are remarkably popular in India (where nearly 61 percent of all skin-care products contain lightening agents), the Caribbean, China, Latin America, and amongst African-Americans.

Lupita Nyong’o on a normal day, and as she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. Photo: Getty, Vanity Fair

So what is driving this obsession with lighter skin?

In a word: colourism. Coined by writer Alice Walker, colourism refers to discrimination within communities of colour towards those with darker skin. The preference for white skin is so firmly entrenched, two-thirds of Nigerian men saying they would prefer a lighter-skinned wife.
According to African-American author Iyanla Vanzant, the roots of colourism can be traced back to slavery. As black female slaves were ‘bred’ with their white owners, their children became successively lighter skinned and received preferential treatment. Darker skinned slaves toiled in the fields as their lighter counterparts were permitted indoors to service the ‘mistresses’ of the house.

 Similar stories occurred in India during colonisation when fairer Indians, who more closely resembled their European colonisers, were favoured over their darker counterparts. Fair skin became associated with wealth, power and status, and darker skin with poverty, backwardness, and field work.

It is vital to recognise these origins of colourism in any discussion of it. Vanzant calls colourism, “A consequence of internalisation of a white-dominated society’s entrenched white racial preference.”
In the Caribbean, the minority light-skinned community forms the majority of the ruling elite. This is, according to Caribbean-born writer Elizabeth Pears, “the effects of generations of wealth and privilege and marrying the ‘right’ people from the ‘right’ (and light!) families.”
In India, famed commercial director Prahled Kakkar admits that fair people are routinely cast over darker skinned rivals. “I often fight with clients if I think one (dark skinned actor) is a better performer, but clients are very open about not wanting to take what is seen as a risk.”
Dark skin is also seen as a risk in the west as the magazine industry’s attitude to black skin attests. Most recently Vanity Fair has come under fire for apparently lightening the skin of 12 Years A Slave star Lupita Nyong’o by several shades. Some claim it is just a ‘trick’ of the lighting, but regardless, the effect remains the same.

“One glaring omission is the role of colonialism and its consequences in introducing and reinforcing ‘colourism’. While it is uncomfortable to admit that white privilege was built on the back of oppression and slavery of people of colour, not doing so means we are only making token gestures to address these issues.”

Other stars who appear have been subjected to the lightening treatment include Gabby Sidibe and even Beyonce, who would already pass the notorious ‘paper bag test.’

In the early 1900s to the 1950s, African-Americans (who had by now internalised white society’s preference for lighter skin), held ‘paper bag parties’, pinning a brown paper bag to the front door; anyone whose skin was darker than the bag was denied entry. This ‘test’ was even used to determine admission to historically black universities and colleges. The implication is clear. The closer to white you are, the more intelligent, the more beautiful, the more acceptable.

Colourism is a system of discrimination that privileges light skin, Anglo features, and “good hair,”. For African Americans the reality of colourism is present daily - a remnant of slavery, embedded in America’s consciousness since the antebellum period. As black social scientist E. Franklin Frazier notes, in a controversial study of the black bourgeoisie in the 1950s, mulattoes (blacks with white ancestry, often referred to as “biracial” today) have lived a privileged existence when compared with their “pure black” counterparts since chattel slavery. Fair-skinned blacks, or “house Negroes,” were often given additional privileges, such as working indoors and, at times, the opportunity to learn to read and to be emancipated by their white fathers, whereas dark-skinned slaves, or “field Negroes,” often worked in the fields and had more physically demanding tasks.
The internalisation of this “field Negro/house Negro” mentality and valorisation of light skin tones continues to systematically affect the lives of African Americans and greater society in both overt and covert ways. While all African Americans are subject to certain kinds of discrimination and second-class citizenship, the intensity, frequency, and outcomes of this discrimination vary drastically by skin tone, and there are far greater “benefits” that come with lighter skin. Research shows that skin-color hierarchies operate in schools (some teachers respond more positively to light-skinned students and parents), dating and marriage markets (light-skinned black women are more likely to marry spouses with higher levels of education, occupational prestige, or income than their darker-skinned counterparts), the labor market (lighter-skinned blacks are more likely to be hired for jobs than darker-skinned blacks with same qualifications), and the criminal justice system (darker-skinned blacks have more punitive relationships with the criminal justice system compared with their lighter counterparts). As a result, light-skinned African Americans continue to earn more money, complete more years of schooling, marry “higher-status” people, live in better neighborhoods, and serve shorter jail sentences than dark-skinned African Americans.
This internalisation of the preference for whiteness was highlighted in the famous Clark Doll experiments of the 1940s, in which dark-skinned African-American children were presented with two dolls and asked to choose which dolls were prettier and smarter, and which doll was ‘bad.’ Overwhelmingly, the kids chose the white doll in the first two categories and the black doll in the last. When asked why this doll was bad, they responded ‘Because she’s black.’
This experiment was the inspiration for Dark Girls, a 2010 documentary exploring the effects of colourism on African-American women. Heartbreaking testimonials include a women’s pain when a pregnant friend quips, ‘Lord, I hope she don’t come out dark’ and a child admitting she doesn’t like ‘to be called black.’
However colourism doesn’t just happen in Africa or America. In the Arab world the discrimination is not as historically entrenched but there is no doubt that a shara, or fairer, light-haired (and preferably coloured-eyed) woman is considered more beautiful than an olive or brown-skinned samra. Some mothers even frequently implore their children not to spend time in the sun should their already olive skin get darker.

Mylinda Morales, now a yoga teacher in Florida, tells a similar story amongst Hispanic farmhands in America: ‘There is an incredible amount of shame about being a migrant farmworker. My mom didn’t want us getting “prieta” – dark coloured or tanned. We would wear a long sleeve shirt with a long sleeve dress shirt over that, heavy blue jeans, gloves, a large hat and sunglasses. And the temperature would be in the 100s (30+ C).’

When MyLinda got married to a keen waterskier and joined him on boating trips, her mother would, ‘get so upset. Every time I would visit her, she would make an awful face and say I “look so dark.’”

And where does white society fit into all this? Consider this study that found white people misremember intelligent black men as being lighter-skinned than they actually are. There remains an underlying assumption that the lighter your skin, the more intelligent and less threatening you are.
This undeniable bias toward lighter skin has also left some lighter skinned members of a community on the receiving end of discrimination for presumed favouritism. One SBS Insight episode examined how some Indigenous (and light skinned) Australians are forced to  ‘prove’ their aboriginality.
Likewise, light-skinned African-Americans on a recent Oprah special claimed they suffer the usual racist insults aimed at blacks, as well as taunts (such as ‘light-bright’) from darker blacks. ‘But we’re still black in America,’ one woman implored. ‘None of us feel advantaged.’

“It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds — cooled — and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.” – Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Colourism is oppression within oppression within oppression. This internalisation of ‘white’ as the beauty ideal, as the most intelligent and desirable form of humanity, has led to communities (which many outsiders would presume are united), facing their own battles with discrimination and alienation in a bid to access the few privileges white society is willing to grant them.
It’s difficult not to think that the spectre of slavery and colonisation will always haunt us, especially when so many still refuse to acknowledge the ways in which the past informs the present. Iyanla Vanzant reminds us that, ‘The first step to solving any problem is to admit there is a problem.’
Until we face this problem, then dangerous products like Whitenicious will only continue to flood the market some of them causing serious  skin ailments. Worse still we’ll potentially have a  generation of Africans who won’t know what it is to celebrate their skin colour in all its various shades, hues and glory.

“The color of your skin is not a cross you bear. It is beautiful.”