Addressing the Elephant in the Black Room

By: Karabo Mashaba

My childhood consisted of red-rosy cheeks from all the blushing done whenever people would jokingly ask “do you bath in milk?”, “wow, you definitely can’t be black.”, “are you coloured?”.

This inherently stemmed from the ideologies I was raised under which asserted white supremacy and idolized features in close proximity to non-blackness. Growing up as a light-skinned girl and being surrounded by such stigmas – even within my own family – I had been unaware that the colour of my skin had been contributing to an intra-racial complexion- based hierarchy that was responsible for the continuous subjugation of my dark-skinned counterparts.

The hyping up of light-skinned women, or to lay it down colloquially, ‘ama-yellowbone’, is a continuation of colonial dictatorship and the maintenance of Eurocentric standards of beauty. Even though this is something that affects the Black community collectively, women of darker skin always find themselves entwined within a toxic realm of colourism and misogynoir.

The older I got, the more my mind formed a greater understanding of the existence of identity politics. While lighter skin is fetishized and used as an agent of asserting toxic masculinity, the dark-skinned body is literally crucified for not fulfilling the desirable standard of beauty. The underlying connotations that these patterns of behaviour illustrate is that the only time blackness is accepted or tolerated is when it is diluted.

The white supremacist and patriarchal nature of our society has created a playground for the sexual fantasies of men. It is of utmost importance to acknowledge the privilege and social capital that lighter skin accords in a world where your value is determined by your relativity to whiteness. Denying privilege is inherently to perpetuate it. Turning a blind eye on colourism is to give it permission to keep thriving. Black women need to realize that communicating about colourism, misogyny and the legacy of racism is not something that should bring about division, but rather it should be a tool that can guide us in the quest of psychological, and eventually structural liberation. HM