The darker side of colourism

A while back I was having a conversation with a friend about whether or not colourism existed in South Africa. The topic had caught my attention after I had finished watching a well-structured debate on an online Black American show that tackled the issue.

I was eager to know whether we could relate to their plight and, if so, on what grounds. My conversation with my friend was my first point of research. So I asked her: Do you think colourism exists in South Africa?

“Na… it doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how light you are or how dark you are, you can still get the job you want and no one discriminates against you for that.

“Even this yellow bone guy that’s talking to me now, he’s not even cute so it doesn’t mean if you’re light you get all the girls,” she said while rolling her eyes.

This response irritated me.

What is colourism? According to the Oxford dictionary, colourism is “prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group”.

I always knew that like other isms, colourism was only meant to favour a specific group, the lighter-skinned. I knew it existed when all the boys in my class in primary school rarely eyed the darker-skinned girls and jumped at any opportunity to be with the light-skinned girl, commonly known as a “yellow bone”. My friend is light-skinned. I am dark-skinned.

I could have argued with her, trying to drill into her that the colourism I was talking about was not that obvious. It was ingrained in us over generations and was now a part of the social lenses we viewed our world through.

But this conversation was more than that. We speak of racism and how it affects the everyday lives of previously disadvantaged racial groups.

We talk about sexism and how women are always at the negative end of the stick.

But we talk about colourism and no one knows what to say. I used to think of it as the black community’s very own secret that no one wanted to speak about. But it isn’t. There is just pure ignorance where colourism is concerned and this conversation was an example of that.

As a dark-skinned young woman living in South Africa, I believe there is a lot of learning that needs to happen.

We have been conditioned to believe that lighter is better. That is the only reason the boys in my primary school class would behave the way they did. That is the only reason why many darker-skinned girls want to be lighter and even consider taking the bleaching route, which could affect them in the long run.

Trending hashtags like “Melanin popping” and “Dark is beautiful” did a lot to uplift darker-skinned women and girls in recent years but I think, as a society, we need to work towards understanding that we only create divisions within the community when we celebrate a segment because they are lighter and because, to us, they represent a closer proximity to whiteness. Ironically, there is also colourism within the white community.

I was still at the starting point of research when I spoke with my friend and I am still committed to learning more about it. I feel we all should.

Chisom Jenniffer Okoye.

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