"Lightness" prejudice


I'm watching this film for first time right now. So far, it's fascinating in that it delves into a topic that rarely comes to the surface nowadays -- how different skin tones were viewed among African-Americans themselves. I've read discussions of this in a few places, but I've never seen it examined in a movie.



*****
We are doomed.

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The topic of skin tone in the black community is discussed quite frequently on black blogs, in black movies, there are books and articles written about it, etc. Black people talk about it all the time.


That hexagon-face bitch, she's so passive-aggressive.
-SpencerFan

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Thanks -- that's a good point.

*****
We are doomed.

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I don't know how skin tone is or isn't regarded in other countries but in the U.S. during slavery it was a big deal to white people, who used it as yet another of the nonsensical physical attributes by which they'd divide and judge black people. Lighter complected slaves (often the children of the slaveowner thanks to rape of an enslaved woman) were more apt to be assigned to work in the house/mansion instead of the fields, so the divide among black folk was imposed on them and mattered a great deal as far as opportunities were concerned, both before and after abolition. So it's no surprise that black Americans took a lot of interest in skin tone; it determined almost all of what they and their children could expect out of life for so long. Still matters when you least expect it too.

The same judgements based on physical appearance were applied to Italians, Irish, pretty much any immigrant group as well. Most people were convinced that character left its mark and you could tell what kind of person someone was by physical clues, hence the popularity of phrenology at one time. The standard of physical beauty was considered fixed and indisputable; white and more or less English in appearance. You can see it at work in the silent film era where actors, especially women, were pretty relentlessly typecast based on their looks. Compare the female lead with the "sinister" or "seductive" or "foreign-and-therefore-untrustworthy" second female lead.

This continued until about the 1960s. Not saying it's entirely gone now - Serena Williams (21 Grand Slams won) and Maria Sharapova (5 Grand Slams won) are both great tennis players and personable, generous women but according to Sports Illustrated, Williams only makes half as much on endorsements as Sharapova.

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The director at the Black hospital was a stupid fool.

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