Colorism

Is colorism in Hollywood a problem? A pilot study was conducted on two actresses , dark-skinned actress Lupita Nyong'o who won Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2014 for her portrayal of a slave Patsey in the 2013 movie " 12 Years a Slave, " 2013, and light-skinned actress Halle Berry who won Best Actress Oscar in 2002 for her portrayal of a widow Leticia Musgrove in the 2001 movie " Monster's Ball. " Data obtained from the mixed-methods design employed in the study found a significant difference in how often an actress' complexion was used in a news story and how they were described using the language of racial capital. Contrary to expectations set by understanding of the concept of colorism, darker-skinned Nyong'o's racial capital was stated in the news less prominently than the racial capital of lighter-skinned Berry. Ac-tresses' celebrity capital and ways of conversion of capital is visualized in Venn diagrams.

In the eighteenth century, the African American community began a process of forming an identity using experiences of shared oppression and physical appearance.  Communal bonds were incomplete and often fragile due to the variance of skin color that shaped black interactions with the larger world and in turn with one another.
The historical lens reveals the formation of individual identity as a process that interacts with common political and economic goals among people who shared cultural and/or ancestral ties.  In the eighteenth century, the African American community formed a cohesive and physical appearance.  However, these communal bonds were incomplete and often fragile.  The focus on the commonality of ethnic Africans facing the rigidity of the binary black/white identity obscures the conflict within ethnic African communities that resulted from a divergence of political and economic possibilities.  Although ethnic Africans shared space and identity they were arrayed in a variety of skin colors.  Skin color acted in a larger society, as well as within African American communities, to divide peoples.  I argue that within eighteenth-century ethnic African communities there were multiple identities based on skin color that shaped how individuals viewed and interacted with each other and the larger world.

Abstract Utilizing advertisements and some pictures from The Chicago Defender, The Crusader, The Crisis, The New York Amsterdam and Ebony this paper explores the extent to which the Black press supported the use of chemicals to bleach the skin of African American women between 1915 and 1950.

In order to address issues of racism, sexism, and colorism in society, we must evaluate where these prejudices exist within ourselves—especially in our language. Dr. JeffriAnne Wilder, of the University of North Florida, asserts that the way we talk about skin color is important in
implications about racism and colorism. Colorism, or the social preference of light skin tones, affects the lives of many People of Color, but most harshly affects Women of Color. To demonstrate how colorism is a gendered issue, it has been widely observed that the skin complexion of Women of Color influences opportunities in understanding the larger social implications about racism and colorism. Colorism, or the social preference of light skin tones, affects the lives of many People of Color, but most harshly affects Women of Color. To demonstrate how colorism is a gendered issue, it has been widely observed that the skin complexion of Women of Color influences opportunities in job markets, marriage markets, and even personal self-esteem. Using unobtrusive methods, this paper analyzes the names of make-up colors to detect colorism biases fostered by the cosmetic industry. Across a sample of over 300 foundation colors, there is evidence the light skin tone names portray more positive and feminine images than the names of medium and dark skin tones.

The Afrocentric view concerning Jamaicans who bleach their skins is that they suffer from self-hate, a result of the lingering psychological scars of slavery. The self-hatred thesis is tested by comparing the self-esteem scores of a small convenience sample of skin bleachers with the scores of a control group. The two groups have almost the same average scores above the median, which indicates that skin bleaching did not occur because of low self-esteem. The preliminary results suggest that there are varied reasons for skin bleaching and there is a range of Black identities as each person constructs his or her identity in a multicultural society.

In an effort to provide audiences the opportunity to more deeply engage issues of race and identity as raised by the (1)ne Drop project, we have embarked upon a national campus tour. Colleges and universities are now able to host the (1)ne Drop exhibit on their campuses. Curated specifically for college campuses, each exhibit will be accompanied by a multimedia lecture on skin color politics and Black racial identity, entitled “One Drop: Fact, Fiction, or Fate” presented by Dr. Yaba Blay, (1)ne Drop author, Artistic Director of the project, and teacher-scholar of Africana Studies.

This essay explores colorism, or the ranking of individuals based on skin color or racialized phenotype, with a focus on women of Mexican descent. I offer a history of skin color consciousness, linking it to Spanish and Anglo American colonial beliefs about the value of women as reproductive objects and to contemporary articulations of lived experiences with colorism. First, I trace colorism historically, considering how discourses of difference built on sixteenth-century notions of gendered contamination and nineteenth-century notions of purity and prestige were used to construct and privilege whiteness. Next, I draw from interviews with four women who self-identify as Mexican-descent to document how personal experiences with colorism are remembered and understood. These narratives reveal the importance of the family as an institution within which a collective memory of historical white supremacy is continuously performed through colorism. The recognition that colorism is both reproduced and resisted through intimate familial relations opens a space to ask questions about the relationships between contemporary experience and histories of colonization and suggests, finally, that the family is a critical site for decolonial healing.

Abstract Negotiating racial politics in the United States
is a rapidly transforming and dynamic matter. As a result,
racial/ethnic socialization (R/ES) measurement must match
this transformation to reflect the current processes utilized
by Black Americans to manage racial conflict. We describe
the scale construction of the Cultural and Racial Experiences
of Socialization (CARES), a multidimensional
assessment of R/ES based on Racial Encounter Coping
Appraisal and Socialization theory. Additionally, we tested
the CARES for its relation with gender and perceived
racism. Utilizing a national sample of 373 Black college
students, Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed the CARES
to have 35 items and a 5 factor-solution. The CARES
demonstrated strong overall internal consistency and its
factors had moderate to strong internal consistency coefficients.
The CARES factors allude to the complex role of
R/ES as a social cognitive strategy for managing racial
conflict. New concepts include both racism and bicultural
coping strategies. We move beyond traditional concepts of
cultural mistrust, which focus on a suspicion of the motives
of White people, with the Racial Stereotyping factor that
includes messages conveying cynical views of other Black
people based on social class, gender and colorism. Gender
differences in R/ES indicate that parents may perceive the
consequences of racial conflict and miscues to be more
dismal for their sons than their daughters. Interaction effects
were found between R/ES and perceived racism.
Family practitioners can use the findings to guide parents
that are vacillating on the importance of discussing racial
hierarchies with their children.

In present day India, there is an obvious preference for light skin as evidenced by matrimonial advertisements, media and cosmetics. Many scholars have attempted to attribute this phenomenon to a variety of sociological influences -- the theorized Aryan migration, the Islamic Conquest, or the British colonial rule of the subcontinent.  This paper does not seek to determine the precise cause of it, but rather, it shows a dramatic shift in the perception of skin color in Indian society through the examination of historical scriptures and art.

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

Environmental activist and ardent advocate for children’s rights and well-being, Jamaican laureate of the 2008 Jamaican National Literature awards, Diana McCaulay, published her critically acclaimed debut novel Dog-Heart in 2010. This paper will first focus on the legacy of colonial racism in Jamaica, before addressing the main characters’ quest for identity in a crime-ridden society.

Recent studies in CDA show that the prominence and quantity of advertising in today’s society are influential factors in the formation and acceptance of ideologies. Incorporating the frameworks of Cook (2001) and Fairclough (1989, 1992), this study examines 40 Pond’s Philippines online video advertisements from Youtube.com. It analyzes the individual and interdependent characteristics of verbal and visual texts, with the goal of identifying their underlying beauty and skin color ideologies. More specifically, this paper evaluates spoken and written texts, music, movement, color palettes, visual imageries and scenarios, among others, in order to determine the linguistic features and devices used to represent and manipulate ideas. The samples analyzed show that there is an unfavorable, biased portrayal of “dark skin” and a partiality for “rosy white glow.” This study proposes that the verbal and visual texts employed in Pond’s Philippines online video advertisements, as validated by corresponding survey results, contribute tremendously to the existence of colorism in the Philippines.

As social movements have been sparked across the United States over recent years to bring attention to and combat various forms of racial inequality, from police violence to mass incarceration to economics, one issue has been conspicuously absent as a target: colorism. Among black Americans colorism is almost ubiquitous, creating vast skin tone disparities. Recent studies reveal that darker skinned black Americans are considerably more likely to experience violence at the hands of law enforcement, receive longer criminal convictions for the same crimes, and suffer an economic penalty of thousands of dollars relative to their lighter skinned counterparts, among a wide variety of other social and economic inequities. In some cases, the gap between the social and economic outcomes of light skinned black Americans and darkskinned black Americans are as large as the gap between white Americans and black Americans. This leaves an important outstanding question: why, then, have racial social movements in the United States consistently neglected not just to center a discussion of color but to even emphasize it as an important factor shaping the lives of black Americans? This manuscript will answer this question by using theories of durable inequality and path dependence to explore the history of color in the United States to explain how skin color stratification became cemented among black Americans and how it became so taken-for-granted that it has neglected to attract significant social movement attention. I argue that the crux of the issue builds from the United States' historical infatuation with fixed and immovable racial categories as the country sought to institute Jim Crow segregation laws in the wake of Emancipation and Reconstruction. This led black Americans to counter with calls for black collectivism that decentered the importance of color in favor of presenting a unified front to combat segregation. This "black is black" orientation remains dominant among black and white Americans leading both to ignore vast intraracial color disparities in favor of a focus on race that fails to adequately address the needs of the most vulnerable: dark skinned black Americans.

The purpose of this study is to inspect how the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White” has tied the concept of beauty for girls with fairness of skin and how –as a result—modern adaptations of this fairy tale (cartoon, like Warner Bros.’s 1943 animated short Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs and literary, like Helen Oyeyemi’s 2014 novel Boy, Snow, Bird) have reacted to this issue (however different the purpose and methods are) by featuring primarily dark-skinned characters as the protagonists (“So White” in Coal Black and “Bird” in Boy, Snow, Bird) in stark contrast to the original tale.
It also covers the effects of the fairytale “Snow White” on equating beauty with light skin amongst young girls, as well as the response it caused as revealed in its two adaptations Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, a short animated feature and Boy, Snow, Bird, a novel.

“Wake up Ali, wake up!” repeats the folk song. “Arap Ali” (Black Ali) was a folk hero and my paternal grandfather, who was murdered by British colonial soldiers. The song motivated the production of the first-ever Turkish Cypriot opera in 2019. The art form presented actual Black people as white. Connecting personal memories to the symbols of staged whitewashing, this study seeks to understand hidden colorist cultural practices in Cyprus. I discuss the ways in which global racism and colonialism are strongly entangled with local racist and colorist practices. This autoethnography is a call to wake up and take a stand against silencing and oppression.

As a result of 500 years of European colonization in the Caribbean, aspects of Jamaican society have been, and are currently, stratified by color; an issue that goes virtually unspoken within most Jamaican communities both on and off of the island. 5 centuries ago, millions of African people were enslaved and brought to the New World, and have subsequently been discriminated against, since. However, in Jamaica, this discrimination has taken place on an obvious scale differing in severity between those with light skin and those with dark skin. Those with lighter skin were typically discriminated against less than those with darker skin. This research paper will focus on the presence of what has come to be known as Colorism, a term first coined in 1983 in the United States by writer and activist, Alice Walker.

Most sociological research on racial discrimination has had an “inter-racial” focus. That is, researchers have been principally concerned with the disparate treatment that people of color receive relative to Whites in different social contexts. However, recent theoretical work emerging from legal studies sug- gests that an alternative conception of “intra-racial” discrimination exists that extends beyond colorism. This theory of intra-racial discrimination stipulates that many organizations in the “post-racial” era desire some measure of racial diversity. Yet, in their efforts to achieve this racial diversity they screen people of color based on their degree of racial salience. Whether a given person of color is hired, promoted, or in the case of college admissions, accepted, is a function of whether or not Whites within the organization consider them racially palatable, or not overly concerned with race. This creates an incentive for people of color to work their identity to allay any concerns among Whites that they may be too racially salient. In this paper I critically review this work and attempt to further buttress its claims by highlighting how this process has clear historical precedent. I conclude by showing how the audit method can be used to empirically examine this practice contemporarily.

Basándose en investigación bibliográfica, en el presente texto se describen y se analizan los estudios que abordan las expresiones del racismo colorista en las representaciones mediáticas en México. La importancia de esta revisión del conocimiento existente se debe al hecho que las representaciones mediáticas visuales participan en la creación de los imaginarios sobre lo significante y lo insignificante, lo que posteriormente se impregna socialmente en las experiencias y las relaciones cotidianas, tanto al nivel individual como colectivo.
Se concluye que existen pocos estudios cuyo enfoque central haya sido el colorismo en los medios de comunicación en México, aunque dichas representaciones mediáticas es una de las fuentes principales que fomentan una exclusión simbólica de los “otros” e indirectamente normaliza el racismo y el clasismo colorista en la sociedad mexicana. Asimismo, existe una ausencia de estudios sobre el colorismo en los medios sociales, así que dicho tema usualmente se analiza en los medios tradicionales.
Además, se discute de forma crítica el uso de determinados instrumentos metodológicos al analizar el colorismo en los medios, señalando las ventajas y las limitaciones al utilizar determinadas estrategias e instrumentos de investigación.

This paper explores the emotional experience of viewers of color-field paintings by Mark Rothko in a museum setting. Drawing on a range of artwork theories, especially Immanual Kant and Aloïs Riegl, the paper examines Rothko’s particular approach to art and literature related to neuroaesthetics. This exploration culminates in a pilot survey among visitors to a recent overview exhibition of Rothko’s work, conducted at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. The results from the survey suggest there is much reason to extend this empirical exploration in order to elaborate further on the relation between emotive experience and artistic intent.

Depuis « l’affaire du port du voile », des mouvements féministes dits minoritaires ont émergé en France et en Belgique. Cette affaire a mis en lumière la question du racisme dans le féminisme. Tout en utilisant des théories dérivées de l’expérience des peuples noirs, les féministes quelles qu’elles soient contribuent à invisibiliser le vécu des femmes Noires dans les pays francophones. Depuis 2012, quelques femmes Noires, inspirées par le Black feminism, ont décidé de créer un mouvement de lutte afroféministe afin de rendre leur existence visible dans l’espace public et ainsi lutter contre les inégalités et discriminations éprouvées. Qui sont-elles ? Quelles sont les oppressions auxquelles elles doivent faire face de par leur appartenance à au moins deux groupes minoritaires et discriminés? Comment ont-elles réalisé la nécessité de lutter contre cette assignation identitaire, collective et sociale, que les femmes Noires seraient censées accepter ? Quelles sont leurs stratégies de lutte ? Á travers cette étude, les afroféministes utilisent leur voix afin de nous mettre sur la voie.

This working paper examines the social impact of the film industry in India during the first four decades after Indian Independence in 1947. Its shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India and the counterpart in scale to Hollywood in the United States, shared Hollywood’s privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. Bollywood reflected views on skin color and gender long prevalent in Indian society, but this working paper shows that serendipitous developments helped shape what happened on screen. The dominance of Punjabi directors and actors, organized as multi-generational families, facilitated lighter skin tones becoming a prominent characteristic of stars. By constraining access to legal finance, pursuing selective censorship, and by denying Bollywood cinema the kind of financial and infrastructural support seen in other developing countries, the Indian government also incentivized directors and producers to adopt simplified story lines that appealed to predominately rural audiences, rather than contesting widely accepted views. Employing new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors, the paper suggests that cinema not only reflected, but emboldened societal attitudes regarding gender and skin color. The impact of such content was especially high as rural and often illiterate audiences lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and to some extent regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. The cases of parallel cinema and Tamil cinema are examined, but their audiences were either constrained or – as in the case of Tamil cinema – subject to the isomorphic influence of Bollywood, which grew after policy liberalization in 1991.

The aim of this paper is to highlight a specific form of discrimination related to the “melanin diversity”. This form of discrimination is often and unconsciously acted through the words. The results of this study are part of a wider research project with a view to detect stereotypes and prejudices related to skin color in primary school children. This research project had confirmed that the melanin prejudice is still present and widespread in this age group and it allows to focus on the words that children use to name skin colors and their meanings. Ethnocentric and white-centric shades are often hidden under these words.

The popular explanation for skin bleaching among Black Jamaicans is self-hate. The concept of complex personhood debunks the psychopathology explanation of skin bleaching. Complex personhood is an autonomous, multidimensional, nuanced and optimal self that displays strength, weakness, resilience, ambiguities and contradictions.  Some of the skin bleaching literature frames the skin bleachers as self-hating, restricts identity to a binary, argues erroneously that there is only one way to be black and silences the skin bleachers in public discourse. The self-hate explanation for skin bleaching in Jamaica is informed by the doll study in America which confounds the minority of Black children’s choice of a white doll with self-hate. The self-esteem studies in Jamaica and America refutes the self-hate thesis. The use of complex personhood to understand the behavior of the Jamaican skin bleachers liberates them from the self-hate explanation for their behavior and provides the alternative explanations of miseducation and colorism.

Keywords: skin bleaching, self-hate, complex personhood, miseducation, colorism, Jamaica