I finally got a chance to watch "Dark Girls" a documentary that premiered this week on the OWN network. This documentary lit up the Black blogosphere and social media with conversations and debates about colorism.
I found myself having to rewind several times because I kept gasping and shouting out at the beauty of the women and girls onscreen. I was also struck by the obvious pain in the eyes of so many of these girls and women. As a Dark Girl myself a lot of the pain resonated with me.
Colorism also came into play when Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones created a controversy with a tweet she made about Rachel Jeantel, a 19 year-old who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin when he was murdered.
In the Dark Girls documentary people talked about growing up hearing negative comments about darker Blacks. Mine was the complete opposite. I grew up hearing a lot of negative comments about light-skinned Blacks. I heard terms like "wasted yellow" as in a light skinned Black person who was unattractive and their high yellow complexion was deemed wasted on them.
The disdain for light skinned Blacks that was going on around me did not make me as a dark-skinned, kinky haired girl feel better about myself. It put the idea in my head that maybe the hatred toward light skin Blacks was jealousy and that they were better than us. It made me long to look like the biracial girl in my class because she was so loved by all of the Black boys.
As I got older and was able to unlearn some of the things I internalized as a child, I've often wondered why it has to be one or the other. Why do we have to uplift one and put down the other? Why can't we celebrate the beauty of Lolo's athleticism AND Rachel's courage on the witness stand at the same time?
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