My Take on Dark Skinned Women in the Black Community

After reading the post “Mommy, I Want To Be White,” a couple days ago right here on Feministing, it brought me to tears. Now it doesn’t take much for me to get emotional, but what made this post hit me so hard is that I don’t really get emotional towards something I can’t relate too. I say this because I can never feel the pain a dark skinned woman feels when it comes to how she’s seen in this society. I would say I fit more towards the “beauty” standard in this society due to my light skin and hazel eyes, and even though I’ve heard a lot of stories on how dark women are treated in this society, I never have really seen something that hit me like this article did.

To break it all down, I just want to talk about the strong words these women have said in the video posted in the article and compare it to what I’ve witnessed in society but never really paid close attention too. The first thing that brought me back to a not-so-pleasant moment was when the first woman talked about begging her mom when she was younger to put bleach in the tub so she could be lighter. When she told this story, it brought me back to age 15. I had a friend that I was close too and I still can’t recall how the topic of skin color started, but I knew she had a major skin complex and me being naive and only 15, I didn’t see what her issue was. The way I saw it, black was black and no matter how many shades we came in, we all were still the same race.

But I remember us talking and her telling me that she wished she could have my eyes and skin complexion so she could be considered beautiful. Me being naive, my response was, “What are you talking about? You’re pretty too.”  I just thought of this moment as one of those moments you see on Sex And The City where women start comparing their looks towards each other and picking and choosing what they want and don’t want. But I do remember getting a couple years older and thinking back to that experience and realizing, “Wow, she really had just told me that because she is black, she is ugly.” And I wanted nothing more to go back to that day where I could have told her to embrace her tone instead of just saying, “You’re pretty too.”

There were three main parts of this video that made me sympathize hard for these women, as well as made me enraged with society. The first one would be how the women expressed their thoughts on their feelings when it came to children. I remember the first one mentioning how she had wished for her daughter to come out lighter than her. Now most people would look at this and see self-hatred, but that’s only a part of it. It’s also about safety. From things I’ve witnessed, dark skinned women have an ugly stigma when it comes their tone. They’re seen as ignorant, trashy, and low class according to our society, and the one thing you don’t want is your child living with that stigma. It brings me to tears to fully comprehend that our society won’t change anytime soon. It was all too familiar to hear the story of the woman who gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and hear the words, “Girl, I’m so glad she did not come out dark!” Who really wants to hear that after giving birth? Who wants to hear that they should be ashamed of something as simple as a skin tone? And the problem is that comments like this are too common in our society. At least in the black community, we see these comments as normal and sometimes acceptable.

In the video, they showed an African-American child a display of animated girls (keep in mind, they are all exactly the same except for their skin tone), and they asked which girl looked like the smart one, which one looked liked the dumb one, which one was the prettiest, and which one was the ugliest? The girl pointed to the lightest girl as the smart one and the pretty one, and she pointed to the darkest girl as the dumb and ugly one. This is a test I have seen in many different forms. No matter how much we try to progress, young African-Americans girls are still suffering from their self-esteem, which explains a lot about why many girls grow up to have skin complexes no matter how much they try to overcome it.

Now the last main part of this video just enrages me. It’s the talk about how black men view dark skinned women. I’ve heard this WAY too many times in the black community. Many black men won’t date a dark skinned woman, at least not seriously. I would assume it’s not just the negative stereotypes dark skinned women have to deal with but it’s also the society standard. The longer your hair is and the lighter your skin is, the more beautiful you are. I have met too many black men that want a woman that lives up to that, because they want that “beauty” standard being on their side. At first I was just enraged, but then I felt that black men are victims of this too. When I heard the man in the video talking about what he found attractive, it sounded just like a woman off of KING magazine. It sounded more like he was explaining the woman he is supposed to be attracted too, not the woman he truly really wanted. It shows how much institutionalized and internalized racism has really affected us.

There were too many parts in this video that hit me as examples of things I have witnessed in my life and said nothing about, because I never knew what to say. I felt it wasn’t my place to say it. I’ve actually heard dark skinned people say that when they were younger, they would scrub themselves as hard as they could because they felt their skin was dirt, people who say things such as, “Oh, she’s pretty for a dark skinned girl,” and even more hurtful things such as, “If she was lighter she would be gorgeous.” All these comments, I’ve heard before. And to this day I never know what to say. You can always say, “Your skin is beautiful, you don’t need to change.” But, it’s going to take more than that. There has been so much internalized hatred in the black community about dark skin that it needs to be addressed in a different light, I just wish I knew how to do that.

Anybody who didn’t read the article, here it is.

I feel that the video is extremely important to look at and analyze.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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