Pigment and Prejudice: Reflecting on Colorism’s Insidious Impact

The term “colorism” was first introduced in 1983 by the Black American author Alice Walker, as a “prejudicial preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color” (Walker, 1983, 290). In India (with which I’m more familiar) and in much of the world (as I’ve read about), colorism has partnered with capitalism to create a multibillion-dollar industry, permeating every aspect of society from beauty products and matrimonial ads to job markets and Bollywood.

One of my earliest conscious memories of color preference was when I was four years old. My cousin was born very light-skinned compared to the average Indian person and was thus praised a lot. I remember her mother adoringly calling her “Snow White” as she wrapped her up in a towel after a shower. I internalized then that being light-skinned was a characteristic that would win you more love and appreciation from your parents. But my adventures in colorism started even before I have conscious memories – toxic systems get you young. When I was three years old, I pushed one of my friends off our roof deck (thank goodness she survived!). My grandmother would tell me later that my fit of anger was because the friend had called me a “kaali bhootni”, a “black witch”. I’d happily own that identity now (!), but as a three year old operating in the Indian context I understood it as the insult it was intended to be.

When I moved to the UK at around four and half years old, no doubt the color contrast between myself and the majority of my classmates was far bigger than the shades of brown that people cared about in India. I still have a vivid memory of dancing at a school disco as a six year old, with my white friends and watching the disco lights dance off their faces and thinking Wow, they’re so beautiful, they glow in the dark. I went to the bathroom during the disco and saw my own dark small face staring back at me from the mirror and I remember very clearly my thought at the time: Wow, I’m so ugly.

This view was of course, reinforced by nearly every encounter with every form of media before then, and plenty since then. I played with white barbie dolls – all my brown friends did. Black dolls were probably available, but our parents didn’t think we were black, so we didn’t have any. I watched Thumbelina, Snow White and The Sleeping Beauty. Nearly all the princesses in all the movies I watched were white. Thank Goodness for Princess Jasmine and Pocohontas, lone wanderers in this scene. I remember reading the Snow White book with my mother. The Snow White story starts with a woman sewing by a window on a wintry day. She pricks her hand and a drop of blood falls onto the snow outside. She looks at it and wishes for a child with hair as dark as the ebony of the window frame, skin as white as snow and lips as red as the drop of blood. I remember asking my mother what made her so special? Why did her mother want a child like that? My mother explained to me that Snow White, this bundle of characteristics, was the epitome of beauty. I remembered back to my cousin being called “Snow White” and it all made sense in my six year old brain – that was beautiful, and to be beautiful was to be cherished.

So much of beauty is what we’re taught.

Colorism isn’t subtle or taboo in India – people are very open in commenting about people’s complexions (or their weight, for that matter). On one of our trips back to India, our driver made a comment about my dark lips. He didn’t think anything of saying something mean-spirited to an eight year old. He wouldn’t have even remembered what he said 10 minutes later, and I remember it to this day. What you say to children matters. This guy wasn’t especially a bad person. Indian society was such that you’d almost have to be a radical element to not be participating in this system of making some people feel ugly and elevating others based on a characteristic that no one had chosen or had any control over.

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Why is this important?

First and foremost, the unpleasant feeling of being irretrievably flawed or ugly that is superimposed upon darker individuals is not a trivial feeling. It’s something people carry with them for decades, may be their entire life. Furthermore and most dangerously, colorism and racism are close cousins. They feed and encourage each other. “We thus take racism to be the encompassing ideological order and colorism to be a subsystem within this order” note Bajwa et al (2023, “Colorism in the Indian subcontinent“).

Like racism, colorism has real consequences. Looking at studies from various communities of color, we can see disturbingly similar patterns of disadvantage:

• Criminal Justice: A Villanova University study of over 12,000 Black women imprisoned in North Carolina found that lighter-skinned Black women received shorter sentences than their darker-skinned counterparts.
• Marriage Prospects: Researchers in the study “Shedding ‘Light’ on Marriage” found that light skin tone was associated with about a 15% greater probability of marriage for young Black women. A study in India found that women with lighter skin received 14% more marriage offers than women with darker skin (Jha & Adelman, 2009).
• Education: Dark-skinned girls are three times more likely to be suspended from school than their light-skinned peers.
• Income Inequality: A 2016 study in Brazil showed that lighter-skinned people earned 1.5 times more than their darker-skinned counterparts (Marteleto & Dondero, 2016).
• Employment Opportunities: In India, a study revealed that for every 10% increase in skin lightness, there was a 7% increase in the likelihood of being employed in high-paying occupations (Jha & Adelman, 2009).

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As a child, when I used to learn about history, I used to wonder why some, often influential, people of color were so willing to participate in the oppression of their own people. During the height of the British Empire, only about 126,000 British people lived in India, compared to hundreds of millions of natives across present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Even without reading the documented cooperation of various local Princes, it should be clear from these numbers alone that some cooperation was required from local power brokers to rule over such a large population; and some tendency to cleave along religious lines and turn against each other was present that could be readily exploited. Instead of banding together against a common enemy, there were tendencies for the native population to turn against each other. How very convenient for the British.  

I can’t help but wonder and propose the theory that at least in the case of India, people’s own colorism*, aesthetic preferences, and internalized beliefs of their inferiority had some part in this. Self-loathing is really assistive to colonialism, and makes whole populations more vulnerable to exploitation by destroying their sense of unity.

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Looking forward: colorism persists, progress is superficial and slow

Fast forward to 2024, I’d like to say a lot has changed. I almost didn’t bother writing this blog post because I thought ‘I can’t imagine any of my Indian friends today talking to their child or someone else’s child like that today’. We have bookshelves with books with more relatable characters for children of color. You can now find dolls of different shades and shapes in toy stores or at least on Amazon. Makeup brands have widened their offerings in recognition that dark people exist and we have money too! But it’s so easy to extrapolate the world from our bubbles and be wrong about it. The global skin lightening market was valued at $8.3 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $12.3 billion by 2027 (Global Industry Analysts, Inc., 2021). In short, it’s growing. A survey by the American Society of Dermatologic Surgery indicated that around 30% of African American women use skin-lightening products.

The persistence of colorism raises questions about incentives for change. Many individuals like me see how harmful colorism has been, and see that it isn’t just a minor aesthetic preference but a key pillar of the oppression of people of color. However, we face bigger forces: the marketing dollars of corporations who profit from making people feel inadequate to sell them products to fix their manufactured inadequacies, and the ingrained behaviors of many people of color who participate in this system daily. Challenging this deeply rooted prejudice requires acknowledging our role not just as victims, but as perpetuators of colorism. This is our problem to deal with. As Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote for the Guardian: “If white people disappeared from the planet tomorrow, colorism would still exist in our communities, and that is maybe the most painful part.“

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References and Notes

Note: *The British were not the first to colonize the land that is India, there were many preceding and longer-lasting Empires (e.g. the Mughal empire from 1526-1857; and even earlier ones) that some historians have estimated either seeded or propagated the lighter-skin color preference, that the British then built on top of.