Over 16,525,749 people are on fubar.
What are you waiting for?
First, if you are one of those people who thinks that topics like this are taboo or only a myth because slavery is over, please go read somewhere else, because light and dark disctictions are alive and well particularly among black people. And it have roots in slavery. That’s because slave-owners typically gave preferential treatment to slaves with fairer complexions. While dark-skinned slaves toiled outdoors in the fields, their light-skinned counterparts usually worked indoors completing domestic tasks that were far less grueling. Why the discrepancy? Slave-owners were partial to light-skinned slaves because they were often family members. Slave-owners frequently engaged in sexual intercourse with slave women, and light-skinned offspring were the telltale signs of these unions. While slave-owners did not officially recognize their mixed-race children as blood, they gave them privileges that dark-skinned slaves did not enjoy. Accordingly, light skin came to be viewed as an asset among the slave community.
In black America, those with light-skin received employment opportunities off limits to darker-skinned African Americans. This is why upper-class families in black society were largely light-skinned. Soon light skin and privilege were considered one in the same in the black community, with light skin being the sole criterion for acceptance into the black aristocracy. Light skin is so coveted that whitening creams continue to be best-sellers in the U.S., Asia and other nations. Mexican-American women in Arizona, California and Texas have reportedly suffered mercury poisoning after turning to whitening creams to bleach their skin. In India, popular skin bleaching lines target both women and men with dark skin. That skin-bleaching cosmetics have persisted for decades signals the enduring legacy of colorism.
I have noticed as you may have also, that many people in show business have with increasing popularity, chosen to lighten up. Comedians Kim Coles, D.L. Hughley and Sherry Shepherd have all seemed to 'lighten up' from when I first saw them perform around the 1990's. And of course, we all witnessed how the late Michael Jackson went from soul brotha in his younger days, to become Yoko Ono in later life. Many young kids nowadays are because of colorism, percieving themselves as unattractive if they have darker skin. The subliminal message from the media is that white and lighter skinned people are more desirable, happier, successful, trustworthy and just smarter than people who look more African. This drops some people's self-estem so low that hey resort to skin lightening cremes like those mentioned above, to feel more acceptable to our anglo-centric society. What a sorry shame.
