Two Tones

African-Americans come in many different beautiful shades of color- fair, butterscotch, olive, caramel, chocolate. Yet our categories of color are merely labeled either “light skinned” or “dark skinned.” Skin tone is determined by the amount and type of the pigment melanin in the skin. So why does this simple genetic makeup cause such shallow stirs of stereotypes and judgements?

Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin. “On average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education,” Hersch said. These findings are similar to a study co-authored by a University of North Carolina economics professor last year on skin tone and wages among blacks.

“We estimate that dark- or medium-skinned blacks suffered a discriminatory penalty of anywhere from 10 percent to 15 percent relative to whites. This suggests people cue into appearance and draw inferences about capabilities and skills based on how they look.”

-William Darity, Jr., Professor at UNC

In, “A Girl Like Me,” young filmmaker Kiri Davis conducts the famous experiment used in the Brown V. Bd. of Education lawsuit that asks black children to pick between black and white dolls. Most choose the white doll as “good” or “pretty” while they view the black dolls as “bad” or “ugly.” The film also features some provocative interviews with young black girls talking about skin color and the way they wear their hair. Click the picture to view the film.

So what do you think about this color complex, this “attraction” to lighter skin? White people may have the ignorant excuse of “feeling more comfortable” around Blacks with lighter complexions, but there is absolutely no intellectual rationale for such bias. And what excuse do we have when our own people discriminate against each other based on skin tone? It’s one thing to playfully joke that “dark skinned men are in,” or “light skinned men went out in the ’80s,” but as Kiri Davis has shown us, the joke is on us when our children grow up thinking that “lighter is better.”

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Yesterday’s answer: Amistad. Maybe that was a little too easy, try this:

What was the first American colony to abolish slavery?