In a recent essay Tika Sumpter penned for Hello Beautiful, she recalls moments she experienced colorism and what she’s noticed about it.
She writes:
I was recently reminded of my childhood as I watched the amazing documentary Dark Girls (OWN documentary). My heart broke just listening to the stories of so many young girls with brown skin traumatized by the cruel and hurtful views of those around them. I experienced that same emotion when I began my role as Raina Thorpe on the popular CW show Gossip Girl a few years back. I was truly unprepared for the tremendous impact I’d have while on that show. Each week I’d get the tons of letters from mothers, grandmothers, and young girls literally thanking me for simply existing. They wrote me saying they’d never seen a woman that looked like me on television before.
Which really meant they’d never seen anyone that looked like them before. And it got much deeper than that. Some fans even remarked that they’d never witnessed any woman with my skin color speak the way I spoke, have a successful career the way I had on that show, or carry themselves in such a ladylike manner.
Of course, I did experienced my share of hurtful reactions to my skin color, but thankfully only after I was an adult. Who hasn’t heard the obligatory, ‘You’re pretty for a dark-skin girl’? Or my personal favorite, ‘I usually don’t date dark-skin women, but you’re so beautiful.’ That one really warms the heart. But in reality, the most disturbing aspect of all of this is that those comments were most often made by men with exactly the same skin tone as my own.
Self hate is something we really have to talk about in the black community. It’s sad that there’s black men out here who think women that look like them are inferior. It makes you wonder how they feel about their mothers.
Real sh-t.
Love her.
I can so relate. It’s so sad how messed up a lot of us are.
Love me some Tika.
She’s such a beautiful woman.
She’s fine as hell.
Its crazy because instead of fighting against the ones that put these standards into our community, we’d much rather fight each other. And its on BOTH levels at that. From the “She’s pretty but dark”, and the “I cant even see you in the picture, you’re so dark hahaha” … to the “that high yella, piss colored girl and the assumption that “she thinks she’s so cute cause she’s a bright light”. We bring up each other’s complexions way too much. Last I checked, these whypipo see us ALL as Black regardless of the shade. Hell, some of them think we all look alike as it is, doesn’t that say something? It bothers me cause its a cop out. It’s so much easier to deal with an issue by fighting against other victims, rather than addressing it with the ones that created the issue. It’s weak behavior, and we as a people are so much better and stronger than that. Show them that we are a unit, we un-apologetically love each and every flavor and shade we come in…and that they simply don’t set the standard for beauty.