An Introduction to Colorism

By Lawrence Blum

“Colorism” is a term now used to refer to preference for lighter over darker complected people. In the US, the term was first used, or at least brought to prominence, by the African American feminist novelist and thinker Alice Walker (The Color Purple) in the 1980’s. Walker used it to refer to skin-color preference among African Americans, that is, ways that African Americans discriminate against, stigmatize, or prefer lighter to darker skinned blacks.

Thus for Walker, colorism was both a byproduct of but also a distinct phenomenon from racism. To oversimplify a bit, if racism treats all members of the black group in a negative way, colorism makes distinctions within the black group, treating some of them more favorably than others.

The idea of colorism has broadened out beyond stigmatized racial groups, to refer to stigmas on the part of any group toward any other based on skin color. In this form, colorism can be found in many different nations, regions, and cultures around the world, for example, Japan, India, and Brazil (and Latin America more generally). Often the preference is expressed in popular entertainment, where lighter-skinned performers (actors, singers, people in commercials) are preferred to darker skinned ones.

If we ask “what is the source of colorism” we might get different answers in different places. For example, in the US perhaps the source of colorism with respect to African Americans is racism against black people in general. Perhaps darker-skinned blacks are seen as more exemplifying of “racial blackness” than are lighter-skinned blacks, so that preference for the latter over the former could be seen as derivative of racism against the black group itself.

But colorism does not seem to always work this way. In Latin America skin color and race are not always two different things, at least not in the way they are in the US. In many Latin American nations, there is not a distinct ancestry-based idea of race that there is in the US. If someone looks very “white European,” that look defines them. It is not like in the US where there can be a black person who is very white-looking. Perhaps a famous example of this is Walter White, the head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for many years and a leading black civil rights leader, who was nevertheless blond and blue-eyed. In Latin America there is not a distinct racial identity and racial order that is distinct from interacts with colorism. There is just colorism.

Yet in both Latin America and the US it is plausible to think that the basis of colorism lies in white supremacy and Eurocentrism, the idea that people of European extraction are superior to non-Europeans. But it is not clear how much Eurocentrism forms the basis of colorism in Asia, for example.

Another question about colorism is whether it is solely an aesthetic phenomenon—that is, a judgment about who is more beautiful. The focus on TV and film actors, in many countries including the US, generally operates on this assumption. The focus on aesthetics in relation to popular entertainment brings out the gendered dimension of colorism, since it is generally thought that darker-skinned women actors suffer from colorism more than darker skinned male actors. In the US an important pushback against colorism was the actress Lupita Nyong’o’s winning an Academy Award for her performance in the acclaimed film, 12 Years a Slave. Nyong’o is very dark-skinned but was regarded as very beautiful and showed up on the cover of many magazines.[1]

But is colorism always only about assessments of beauty? Could there be skin color preference that concerns something other than beauty? For example, there is some evidence that in the US, darker skin is associated with criminality more than lighter skin.

Colorism, like racism, can be conscious or unconscious. People can have preferences based on skin color without knowing that they do, until perhaps someone points it out to them, or they read about the phenomenon which they had not known about before.

In our Symposium on Colorism, contributors from the Race/Multiculturalism SIG from different countries will address some of these complex issue around colorism—how it relates to racism, the gender dimension, the aesthetic dimension, regional and national differences, different bases of colorism, and others.

[1] Nyongo’s part in the film had absolutely nothing to do with her specific skin tone, nor was it drawing on her beauty in any way.