Unlearning Anti-Blackness & Colourism: Why We Need to End ‘Cancel Culture’
By Estelle Uba
Hey all. So, the title of today’s blog post has been sat in my iPhone ‘Notes’ for months on end. However, due to the recent outcries about anti-black and colourist tweets from well-known Black British influencers and artists, I decided to take it out of my Notes and into the public eye. After the horrors of last week, it seemed like the perfect time to release this post. It needs to be seen. For those of you who have been living under a rock and are probably wondering what on earth I’m referring to, here you go:
https://twitter.com/ullget_slapped/status/1254650992345387013?s=20
To be honest, there is a lot more to this whole internalised anti-blackness and colourism discussion than meets the eye; this Twitter thread doesn’t provide all the answers, nor does it provide the solution. Both anti-blackness and colourism are two complex concepts which go hand in hand. Anti-blackness is hostility or resistance towards black people, whereas colourism is prejudice or discrimination towards an individual based on their skin tone. Both have historical roots that can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas, and to colonisation. During slavery, masters would create a colourist system of classification, whereby lighter skinned slaves (some of whom were products of rape between masters and their slaves) would be assigned the ‘privilege’ of doing domestic labour, whilst their darker skinned counterparts were forced to engage in gruelling field labour under the sun. According to the ‘Willie Lynch Letter’ this systemic segregation was a tool implemented by slaveowners to ‘divide and conquer’ their slave populations, removing their ability to form a united front and, ultimately, a rebellion. This systemic distinction between fair ‘house slaves’ and darker ‘field slaves’ has since been ingrained into Western culture, establishing what we now identify as ‘colourism’, and shaping our unconscious bias towards darker skin tones till today. In case some of you are wondering why colourism also exists in the non-Western world, that is where colonisation comes into the equation. Through colonisation, Europeans were not only able to seize control of the economies of African nations, they were also able to impose their cultures on African societies, from their languages to their Eurocentric beauty standards. Consequently, Africans (and Asians alike) inherited their societal preference for thinner noses, thinner lips, straighter hair and paler skin. The fact that the global skin-lightening industry was worth $4.8bn in 2017 is testament to this. Over 40% of women in Africa practise skin bleaching (the lightening of one’s complexion with the use of chemicals), and in Nigeria (the skin-lightening capital of the world) specifically, the numbers are as high as 77%.
Whereas fairer complexions have too often been associated with being the ‘palatable’ or ‘more acceptable’ form of blackness due to their increased proximity to whiteness, darker skin has been historically framed as less desirable. In fact, studies have shown that darker skinned individuals are more likely to be stereotyped as criminal, less intelligent and less respectable than their fairer counterparts. Throughout history, there has been a pattern of mixed-race and lighter skinned black people gaining access to elite, white-dominated spaces and positions of power much more easily than their darker counterparts. We see an example of this through the character of Addie Munroe in Netflix’s new biopic series ‘Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker’. Moreover, just take our beloved former US president, Barack Obama, for example. ‘The first ever black president of the United States of America’. This is true, of course. However, we would be doing ourselves a disservice as a community if we didn’t ask ourselves these key questions: Would Barack Obama have ever been elected as President if he wasn’t of mixed descent? If Obama was a dark-skinned black man, for example, do you think Congress would even have let him get to the point of running for president? If he didn’t have a hint of white privilege coursing through his veins, would he have been as successful in his political career? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to undermine his competence as a political leader. But I do think it would be naïve of us to pretend that unconscious bias towards appearance doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on one’s career success. ‘Pretty privilege’ is a very real advantage, and in the world that we live in, beauty has been synonymous with whiteness for centuries.
This brings us onto how anti-blackness and colourism affect Black women especially. On Twitter, whenever a dark-skinned black woman discusses her experience as a victim of colourism. There is often a dark-skinned black man who chimes in to hi-jack and ‘Me Too’ her narrative, usually to downplay and trivialise her victimhood. This upsets me. Not because dark-skinned men can’t be victims of colourism. Of course, they can. But because the irony is, many of the perpetrators of colourism are dark-skinned men who vocalise their preference of lighter skinned females, whilst putting down darker women in the process. Plus, unfortunately, in the world we live in, much of a woman’s perceived power and worth lies in her physical beauty, in the same way much of a man’s power lies in his financial capital. (Hey, I didn’t make the rules, guys. Patriarchy did! Feminists are trying to change this.) Traditionally, men pursue women when seeking a romantic partner, therefore, when a dark-skinned woman is made to feel less attractive with insults like ‘blick’ and blanket-statements like “Light skinned girls are penger”, it takes much more of a toll on her self-esteem than it probably would a dark skinned man. It makes her feel like ‘less of a woman’, in the same way that financial deprivation makes a man feel like ‘less of a man’.
Like I said, colourism and anti-blackness go hand in hand, but they are not the same. Although colourism is usually a form of anti-blackness (within the black community at least), anti-blackness doesn’t always include colourism. As far as I know, I have never been guilty of perpetrating colourism. I have always found my darker-skinned sisters beautiful, even though society teaches us otherwise. I remember being a hardcore Destiny’s Child fan at five years old and being confused as to why only Beyoncé’s beauty was celebrated, whilst the gorgeous Kelly Rowland went unappreciated! However, I must confess, I have been guilty of anti-blackness from as early as I can remember. I am still guilty of it. The fact that I struggle to leave my house without wearing a wig or a headscarf to cover what God gave me is rooted in anti-blackness. The fact that I feel compelled to gel my God-given edges down to make them look ‘laid’ or ‘less nappy’ is rooted in anti-blackness. For any black woman reading this, that is in denial, these actions are undoubtedly rooted in anti-blackness, no matter how in control you feel whilst doing them. As black women, we alter our natural hair texture to subconsciously ‘tone down’ or ‘tame’ our black features, and simultaneously, gain proximity to whiteness. Why? Because whiteness = beauty. It’s not ‘just a coincidence’ that little black girls all around the world are willing to endure the burning sensation of chemical ‘relaxers’ and ‘texturisers’ on their scalp just to make their hair silkier and straighter for at least a day or two. Meanwhile, white girls have the privilege of leaving their houses every day with barely a touch of their hair, and without a care in the world. These trends don’t exist in a vacuum.
So yes, both anti-blackness and colourism are by-products of racism and white supremacy. As a race, when you are indoctrinated to believe that your personal features, skin tone and physique are all inherently flawed, how can you not succumb to self-hatred? The black diaspora all over the globe knows immense strength, but it also knows immense trauma. Just like any individual who has endured a lot of pain for a long period of time, we are traumatised. However, we don’t have to become complacent in our trauma. We did not choose our pain, but what we can choose, is what to do with it. That’s why when we see anti-black slurs like “Dark skinned women are manly” or “Black women are aggressive” coming from fellow black brothers and sisters, we must have compassion in our criticisms. As a community, we must learn to stop rebuking people entirely with the social media ‘Cancel Culture’, but rather, call them out on their internalised anti-blackness and self-hate and educate them on how to unlearn it. Every day, on social media and in real life, I see fellow black people turning trauma into triumph, and pain into pride. We are in the process of unlearning and learning: unlearning all the self-hate and anti-blackness we have learnt over the years and learning to love our blackness for what it is. We are learning to embrace our black hair, our black features and our black bodies. Be firm with others who are not there yet, but also be patient and kind; stop ‘cancelling’ and start correcting. Let’s end ‘Cancel Culture’!
Recommended Reading
The roots of colourism:
Facts and statics about the global skin bleaching phenomenon:
https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2019-july-2019/paying-high-price-skin-bleaching
Examples of ‘light skinned privilege’:
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/28/8116799/white-colorism-racism-study
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1523422315616339
https://colorismhealing.com/self-made-a-legacy-of-colorism-in-the-madam-c-j-walker-biopic/
Video which demonstrates anti-blackness in children:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkpUyB2xgTM
Interview with Lupita N’yongo about her experience of colourism as a dark-skinned woman: