On January 19th, Light Girls, a Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry production, premiered on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network. The follow-up documentary to the 2012 film, Dark Girls, illuminates the experiences and stories of light skinned African-American women within the documentary. During the 2-hour documentary girls and women shared struggles of appearance, identity, and privilege. The main objective for the piece was to demonstrate and educate how deep the affects of colorism continues to have throughout the world, especially, in the complexly diverse groups inside the Black community.

In the documentary, colorism is defined as “an act of discrimination or prejudice towards an individual’s skin complexion within a group of people who share the same ethnic or racial group”. It became evident that although Light Girls attempted to tackle the important topics of colorism, such as skin bleaching, it was not as effective in addressing some of the other outcomes that are more subtle and prominent in the Black community.

Within our society, there is a standard of beauty that is rooted in Euro-centric ideals that perpetuates the notion that the lighter you are, the better you are. The familiar saying, “light skin is the right skin” comes to mind in this context. That phrase is a direct manifestation of the influence that colorism has had on the mindset of people when referring to skin color. Essentially, these standards have been conditioned and ingrained into Western culture and negatively affects the way people of color view themselves. In all the ways that it could have been successful in facilitating a deeper conversation within a community, Light Girls failed to examine the results of living as a light skin woman in a world where these white standards of beauty are prevalent.

Often, women who have lighter complexions are more accepted and deemed as beautiful because of how close their skin tones are to that of their white counterparts rather than those of darker complexions. Those who have darker skin are accustomed to receiving undesirable teasing and labeled with negative stereotypes against their skin pigmentation. Now, that is not to say that woman who have light skin do not experience prejudice or racism, however, there is a privilege that comes along with having a lighter complexion.

Iyanla Vanzant says that the elements of privilege in this case is, “One of those things that continue to plague us, I believe, is this issue of value and worth being associated with the shade and the color of your skin. It’s cellular that our lighter skinned foremothers or great-grandmothers got privilege, got noticed, got recognition because they were closer to white than they were to African.”

This form of privilege can be described as a way that women who are of a lighter complexion can benefit from the color of their skin based off of the systematic racial hierarchies that exist within Western culture. By denying light skin privilege within the documentary, one is therefore denying white privilege.

As a light skinned Black woman, I understand that I have a certain level of privilege that some will never experience. My mother, who is darker than me, communicated during my adolescence about how Black people can sometimes be treated differently based solely off of the color of their skin. When I became more self-aware, I realized how much colorism plays a part in our everyday lives. Since birth, we have been conditioned to appeal to certain types of people while rejecting others who do not fit the “approved” standard by which our society lives. This is the result of internalized racism that affects how, we as Black people, act towards and view one another. Through the practice of unlearning all of the racial and social norms that we have been taught, we can then start to reach across our differences, recognize the many levels of our Blackness, and initiate the healing process. Instead of wasting majority of the film reiterating the “woe, is me” narrative, Light Girls could have taken a different route by addressing this privilege that affects both light and dark skin people in order to truly start a discussion on the complexities of the Black experience.

Light skin women are more accepted and represented by being closer to the white standards of beauty than those who have darker complexions.

 

For more information on the documentary click here