How Colorism Shapes Black Girlhood

This year has made it evident that whether you're a Minnesota man celebrating Memorial Day or a member of the British royal family, your skin tone, facial features, and hair texture can determine how you are treated in this world. These three essays about navigating the world with Black skin are part of a larger project, called The Melanin Edit, in which Allure will explore every facet of a melanin-rich life — from the most innovative treatments for hyperpigmentation to the social and emotional realities — all while spreading Black pride. To be born Black is a blessing and a burden. A blessing because, oh, the community and culture we've created. A burden because the world constantly attempts to point out our differences, from our coily hair to our wide noses to our various shades of brown skin. 

There are too many studies and statistics that try to quantify what it is to be a Black woman with dark skin: Dark-skinned women are generally considered less romantically desirable or professionally hireable than lighter-skinned women. Dark-skinned women are criminalized and jailed at a higher rate. Dark-skinned women have historically been either underrepresented or represented in the form of harmful stereotypes in film and TV.

But what these studies will never be able to capture is what this feels like, on a personal, day-to-day level. They will never capture the burden of performance and perfection that this structural colorism demands. To be a dark-skinned Black woman in this world — particularly if your identity also intersects with being fat, or differently abled, or older, or unconventionally attractive, or trans — is to be a constant target of indifference, invisibilization, neglect, suspicion, violence. Is there a study that can quantify the pain, the exhaustion, of that experience?

Here are some things I was taught or observed about being dark-skinned when I was a child: Blonde or unnaturally colored hair of any kind looked inherently "ghetto" on us. Red or pink lipstick was garish. The only colors that worked for us were dark berries and browns. It was important to always look "together," palatable and unassuming, especially in professional settings. Keep your hair laid, edges tamed. Flawless, unblemished skin was a must, the only saving grace of a deep complexion. In subtle and overt ways, society said to me and so many other dark girls that beauty was our only inherent value as women, but our skin was an obstacle to this beauty that was our currency. It was thus a problem that must be solved with lightening creams, dark-spot removers, or religious avoidance of the sun.

I never subscribed to any of these ideas. I knew, even as a young girl, that they were ridiculous. But the ridiculousness of colorism doesn't stop it from existing or diminish the ways in which other people's connotations around dark skin shape the world in which you live. An example, one of too many, of what this has felt like:

Years ago, I went through a particularly bad depressive episode that left me rarely able to leave the house (or my bed) for days on end. My daily uniform became a single set of stained pajamas. My kinky, 4C hair was an uncombed, matted puzzle of tangled strands.

Well into this unkempt state, I got my period and finally had to muster my dwindling reserves of mental strength for the five-minute walk to a nearby pharmacy (part of a popular nationwide chain) to pick up some tampons and maybe, I thought, some expensive-ish skin-care products to remedy the acne breakout and dryness I was dealing with after weeks of neglecting my skin. I threw on some old sweatpants and a hoodie, wrapping the hoodie tight over my messy hair — I wanted to look somewhat "presentable." I walked around the store at a leisurely pace, taking in the sensation of being out in the world again. I felt good.

After paying for my items, I made my way to the exit. The manager of the store, a lighter-skinned Black woman, stopped me. "Ma'am, I have to look inside your bag," she said. "Do you have anything in your pockets? Please remove your hood." I was in such shock that I complied with all that she asked, silent because I wasn't sure what would come out of my mouth if I opened it. After she was satisfied I hadn't stolen anything, I returned the products indignantly and left. I haven't walked in those doors since.

It is impossible to know for sure what about me prompted this treatment. But I know how it made me feel, and that, to my mind, makes any rationalization of it irrelevant. It made me feel bad. It made me feel ugly. I couldn't help but wonder if I had looked more "put together," would I have raised the same amount of suspicion?

You cannot quantify an experience. The pressure to be "together," to approach perfection, isn't solely about attaining beauty for dark-skinned Black women. It's a matter of survival. If we have the access and the means, we're able to fly under the radar, invisible but unharmed. If we don't, we face spiritual and physical violence. I'm thoroughly bored of this type of world. I want to resist it. I'm claiming a world in which dark girls can show up exactly as they are or exactly as they wish to be. I’m claiming this for myself too. Recently, I stopped by a local pharmacy and bought a bright, ruby-red lipstick­ — my first. I put it on in the store, in sweatpants and slides. I checked myself out in the display-case mirror — chocolate skin with acne scars, short hair with fuzzy edges. I felt good.

Zeba Blay is a culture and film critic born in Ghana and based in New York City. Formerly the senior culture writer at HuffPost, her debut collection of essays, Carefree Black Girls, comes out October 19, 2021, from St. Martin's Press.

"Are you albino or are you just light-skinded?" I didn't know how to answer that question when it was posed to me on my first day of second grade at my new school in Washington, D.C. I didn't understand what either of my options meant. Turns out I was just light-skinded, very light-skinded. This was the first time I was made aware of my skin on a color spectrum meant for measuring as part of a categorizing system, a ranking of value.

Before moving to D.C., we lived in an all-white town in southern New Jersey, where my translucent Blackness made me undetectable, initially. My hair, on the other hand, was a site of fascination and separation ever since I could remember. It was a thousand shades of yellow, but I wasn't a silky, Goldilocks type. My locks were thick, tightly coiled, and dense. Inside my nuclear family, I was the only one with blonde hair and was given sweet names like “sunshine” because of the lemony-colored, fat fuzz that encircled my face. In the value system of Black hair, texture, not color, was the primary commodity. And mine wasn't "good" nor was it too "nappy." It placed me almost squarely in the middle of the Black girl hair scale.

Moving from that culturally parched and dreadfully bland place in New Jersey into a primarily Black neighborhood in a predominately Black city (Washington, D.C., was known as the "Chocolate City" back then), I had to learn quickly that outside of my house my hue was being noted and appraised. Employing the Duke Ellington "colored" people categories of "Black, Brown and Beige" (the jazz suite composed by the great Washingtonian maestro for his first concert at Carnegie Hall), everyone in my family was beige — except me. I was crème with high-yella undertones. My brother said I was opalescent. Although I was on the other side of Ellington’s spectrum, I was firmly within the limits of the one-drop rule that has been used to classify Blackness for centuries.

D.C. in the '70s was a glorious, gushing fountain of Black history, hipness, and beauty. At school, in my neighborhood, everywhere I looked there was a splendid bouquet of Black girls of every variety and my deepest desire was to be a flower among them. Back in second grade, I looked up the word "albino" in the encyclopedia and was crushed. As soon as I had found my garden, I had to grapple with the notion that perhaps my lack of pigment was actually a medical condition. (In truth, my less-active melanocytes are simply the result of my roll of our family's genetic dice.) Was I not enough to be gathered among them? Where was the rest of my melanin?

There was one spectacularly pretty girl at my new school: Ann Philpot. Her skin seemed to be made up of every color in every kind of sky: watercolor rainbows in charcoal storm clouds, purple sunrises, and starless midnights were contained in her flesh. It was rich and deep and radiant. Every night I would pray that I would awaken to have lustrous skin like hers. I prayed to be that kind of Black. Unmistakably Black.

At eight years old, I would have no notion that Ann Philpot was surely told she was pretty…for a Black girl. And she didn't know that I, a very light-skinned girl, beseeched God Almighty to make me her kind of pretty. Little Black girls have no space or language to share how much we might admire each other. How we believe we may be beautiful because we have an array of pigments, like flowers. Rather, by the second grade, we are usually conditioned to sift through our skin tones, compare, separate, and pluck each other out.

When I held my newborn daughter, Elenni, and gazed at her fresh baby skin, I thought, She is brown, albeit on the lighter side, but she is beautifully brown. She will not be questioned or picked out. The shade of her flesh will safely place her somewhere near the middle of the Black girl bouquet. My daughter is about the same complexion as Renisha McBride, who was shot in the face through a screen door on a white man's front porch when seeking help after a car accident outside of Detroit. Renisha was 19 years old when she was murdered in 2013. Elenni was 23 at the time. My very light skin shields me. My proximity to whiteness, my small dose of melanin deflects racists' bullets. There is no such protection for the only person on this Earth I would give my life for. Now I pray to God for the safety of all unmistakably Black girls.

Michaela angela Davis is a writer, producer, and image activist whose work is focused on gender, fashion, culture, beauty, and identity. Most recently, Davis collaborated with Mariah Carey on her best-selling memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. Davis is also the creator of the Hair Tales, a project exploring the identity of Black women through the culture of hair.

Growing up I loved beauty, especially makeup. The power of crushed pigments to transform you into anything you wanted to be was and still is pure magic to me. As a kid, I loved the glamour and color of MGM musicals, black-and-white films with Marlene Dietrich (every one a master class in contouring and playing with light), and sweeping, epic movies like Gone with the Wind.

But when I think about the subliminal message that was being sent to me through those movies, it was that I — a Black girl with dark skin, full lips, a juicy West African body, and 4C coils — was invisible.

I never saw any versions of myself in the movies I watched, in these worlds I wanted to be a part of. Instead, negative caricatures were reflected back at me: lazy stereotypes of the angry Black woman, the sassy sidekick, or the fetishized sexually aggressive beast (Grace Jones in the '80s springs to mind). I knew loud and clear by the time I was 10 years old what the world thought of me. I could read the invisible subtitles that told society — and a Black girl sitting on her mum's light-blue couch in central London — what my value was. That couch reminded me of the sky and freedom, as those movies were telling me I should not try to soar too high.

I remember as a teenager going to a beauty counter and being told there was nothing for me there and I should try the back of the floor — perhaps Fashion Fair had something for me. I walked away devastated. I felt as if I had been told to walk to the back of the beauty bus. It was then that beauty's segregation became clear to me. I looked back as the sales consultant wiped down the counter where I had rested my hand, as if my touch needed to be sanitized away. That sense of being on the outside of what has been conventionally considered to be beautiful and aspirational and luxurious has stayed with me throughout my life, well into my 40s. It's why I fight so hard for brands and the industry to change. No one should be made to feel that way, especially based on the amount of melanin they have in their skin.

As a child I thought I was cursed to be dark-skinned. I always felt wrong, even once I started my career. I have spent 20 years working as a beauty journalist, but I knew I would never be a beauty director in the early aughties, the Sex and the City heyday of the magazine world. Jobs I was qualified for — and was actually already doing — were given to women with no beauty experience. But they were a size 0, with blue eyes and swinging blonde hair. They fit the image of power that those magazines wanted to exude.

I knew my Blackness would hold me back in that world. So I became a freelance writer at the age of 23, and never looked back. I wasn't prepared to play "Mammy" to anyone's Scarlett O'Hara. It was painful to acknowledge that my nose and my lips, my hair, and my ass were the reason my dreams were out of reach. However, I knew deep down it was in my power to build my own table at which to feast. I wouldn't wait around for the crumbs off of someone else's, a table where I might never be invited to pull up a chair.

At 43 and as a mother of biracial twin daughters, I knew I had to break the cycle of negative noise so many of us have been brought up with. My daughters are a wonderful mix of me and my husband, who is blond and blue-eyed. But colorism is already an issue for these beautiful nine-year-old girls, as my blue-eyed, lighter-skinned daughter is heaped with praise compared to my daughter with a tighter curl pattern and darker skin. Today, I see it as my responsibility to reframe the story and to try and make things better for these two incredible young ladies.

And if I could go back in time? I would give my 10-year-old self a hug and say, "Despite what those movies tell you, you are seen, you are powerful, you are beautiful. And you are aspirational." I'd also tell her to "just hold on. In the year 2020, the world will turn upside down and in all the chaos and destruction there will be rebirth. People will begin to talk about all the invisible, painful things you have felt. It's not you. You are not wrong and you're not the negative things you've been made to feel you are. When the time comes, raise up your voice and help heal what's going on. You will be seen. You will be heard."

Ateh Jewel is an award-winning journalist, producer, and director. She currently runs a production company with her husband and is creating a makeup line (including foundation) for skin of color.

Photographer: Delphine Diallo
Stylist: Peju Famojure
Hair: Naeemah Lafond
Makeup: Jezz Hill
Models: Vagabon / Community, Jaiiy / Community, Enga /APM

Headshots 
Zeba: Sylvie Rosokoff
Michaela: Helen L. Collen
Ateh:  Courtesy of Ateh Jewel

Now enjoy Essence Gant's wash day routine:

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