#PLACES LIKE COLOR ME MINE SKIN#

As the famous image of whipped Peter played on screen, I sank down in my chair, silently greeting the weight of oppression on my 12-year-old shoulders.

#PLACES LIKE COLOR ME MINE SKIN#

As the film explained the origins of skin tone prejudice, one girl – biracial, hazel-eyed and the only other black girl in class – whispered that she would have been a house slave, but that I would have been a field slave. I have many memories of being degraded because of my complexion, the most piercing is from middle school: two girls giggled in my Georgia history class during the showing of a documentary about slavery. It remains alive even now, insidiously snaking into my life.

This order has since been perpetuated by systemic racism and internalized by black people. As slave masters raped enslaved women, their lighter-skinned illegitimate offspring were given preferential treatment over their darker counterparts, often working in the house as opposed to the fields. Like other systems of racial inequality, American colorism was born out of slavery. We are not as valued as our lighter-skinned counterparts when seeking romantic partners, our dating pool constricted because of something as arbitrary as shoe size. The real issue is staring me right in the face: my deep mahogany skin.Ĭolorism – the prejudice based on skin tone – has stunted the romantic lives of millions of dark-skinned black women, including me. For a while, I concluded I was “not that interesting,” a line I subsequently used as my biography on social media. At first, I thought it was because I was intimidating – a word I’ve heard used to describe me. I’ve spent so much time trying to understand what is so unattractive about me that men shun me.

Places like color me mine