Advisors, Advisors, Authors A-H, Of Women, Race & Ethnicity

The Realities of Dark-Skinned Black Women – by Terry Howard

I begin this piece with a test on your ability to immediately recognize the names of the following  five prominent Black women in the United States. Any luck? 

Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve Board member
Latitia James Attorney General, New York
Ketanji Brown-Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Stacey Abrams, former Georgia State Representative
Jasmine Crockett, Texas State Representative

Now tell us what you’ve noticed about these Black women? Okay, I’ll point out the obvious; they’re all dark skinned! And add to that, they all are outspoken and as a result, have been subjected to caricatures and racist attacks in part because of their outspokenness. Now former Vice President Kamala Harris aside, I scratched my head – and recent memory – trying to recall when light skinned Black women were attacked that way. Well, maybe I missed the memo. 

So let me start the rest of this narrative with a supposition, perhaps one that needs to be teased out later through research. My hunch, unsupported by facts I’ll admit, is that there’s a correlation between their dark skin and the vicious invectives leveled at these women. In other words, the darker they are the nastier the insults. Let that sink in for a moment.

Arguably, Crockett and to a lesser extent James have shouldered the brunt of some of the recent heinous attacks. Hey, say what you want about Crockett, her willingness to duke it out with anyone to defend her positions are TV and social media classics. And pertaining to James, the interested reader may want to check out The Nation magazine’s article, “New York’s Badass AG,” by Joan Walsh and the Latitia James she describes as an “attorney general who has emerged as a North Star in the chaos of Trump 2.0.”

Now the question that answers itself, or should, is whether it is fair that these Black women are constantly met with negativity when they have worked hard to receive the opportunities they rightly deserve? One wouldn’t think so. But from online trolls to racial slurs, these and many other Black women have faced a barrage of hate for daring to punch back and break free from stereotypes. From “being from the hood,” “uneducated” – or the contemporary boogeyman, a “DEI hire” – and attacks on their physical characteristics (hair style, eyelashes, weight, dress, etc.), and despite having graduated from elite universities (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, etc.), Black women have been the persistent target of insults. 

So, to find answers to this treatment of dark-skinned Black women conundrum I decided to do some research to confirm my suspicion that their dark skin is a causative factor in their treatment. To begin, for years Black women were the brunt of the joke on social media. Light-skinned vs. dark-skinned jokes were frequent. 

Well, I’m probably going to have to apologize after this column gets published for sharing some “dirty laundry” about historical realities in the Black community beginning with “moon tanning” and the “brown bag test” that led many of us – yep, me too – to laugh at the insulting jokes about us, succumb to self-loathing and demean ourselves with skin bleaching. So I’ll get that apology out of the way right now…. sorry folks, my bad!

Now bear with me as I first explain “moon tanning.” 

You see, for yours truly this light skin, dark skin thing conjures of vivid memories of my growing up as a snotty nosed dark-skinned lad in Virginia. We were inundated with the subliminal message in jokes and lyrics, among them being, “if you’re Black stay back, if you’re brown stick around, but if you’re white you’re right.”

Further were images of white folks suntanning during the day to get dark like me while many dark-skinned kids were “moon tanning” at night trying to get light like them. Problem is that their tanning worked (well, temporarily) where ours didn’t. Crazy stuff, huh?

Now not to be ignored was the treatment of many light- skinned Black folks who straddled the tightrope of zero or lukewarm acceptance from both Black and white communities because of their pigmentation. They dealt with “Redbones,” ‘white wannabes,” and other demeaning stigmas regularly. I should also mention that light, brown-skinned Black folks who occupied the middle of the dark versus light-skinned spectrum for the most part flew under the radar with “brown sugar,” “Sistah cinnamon,” and other creative terms of endearment. 

My point being readers is this: every Black person in America has experiences, one way or the other, depending on where they are now, or were, on the color line spectrum. Ask those you know if you want to fact check me.   

Next, let me now tell you about the brown paper bag test, a test of colorism where individuals, particularly Black people, were denied entry into social groups or spaces if their skin was darker than a brown paper bag. This demeaning practice, prevalent in the 20th century, was used by historically Black fraternities, sororities and social clubs to maintain an elite status for lighter-skinned members, often manifesting the impact of a history of white supremacy and classism within Black communities. 

Anyone whose skin was darker than the bag was denied entry or privileges afforded to those who were lighter. The test was used to scrutinize individuals, effectively excluding those with darker complexions from certain Black social circles, churches, and institutions. The test was a manifestation of the internalization of white standards of beauty and ideals where lighter skin was associated with privilege and social standing.  

Now arguably an epic game changer that help persuade the United States Supreme Court to strike down segregation in its Brown v. Board of Education decision occurred when Dr. Kenneth Clark conducted the “Doll test” in the late 1930s. In experiment after experiment, young Black girls overwhelmingly pointed to white dolls over dark skinned Black dolls when asked to pick one they liked the most. The chilling images of shock, anger and outrage went viral.

From there, one could argue quite convincingly that soul singer James Brown’s seminal “Say it loud, I’m Black and Proud” flipped the script on self-detestations with a song that challenged the myth of Black inferiority, a time when many beautiful dark-skinned women began showing up on the covers of popular fashion magazines, let alone becoming sought after date material from men who previously ignored them because they were too dark.     

“Some of us piled Afros high on our heads and some of us clenched our fists and cried, “Black is beautiful” in a nation that always told us that you could be one or the other, but never both,” wrote a Pulitzer Prize- winning columnist about emergence of Black pride. For yours truly, my now dearly departed “Fro” was wide and tall enough to put ex-pro footballer Colin Kaepernick’s Afro to shame.

So here we are today, which takes me to a few more words to say on this issue before I go.

First, I wrote this column to introduce – or reintroduce – the reader to the issue of colorism and how it shapes attitudes, perceptions, self-esteem and ultimately decisions about who to include and exclude based on the immutable nature of skin color.  

And second, I decided to call out the relative silence – or more accurately the lack of public outrage – to this country’s shameful indifference to the inexcusable levels of misogynoir, colorism and insults experienced by dark-skinned Black women nowadays.   

I say no more because the preponderance of evidence is irrefutable. 

Terry Howard
Latest posts by Terry Howard (see all)