Hardly a Century later your color determined which water fountain you drank from, where you sat on the bus if you got hired for a job or never called back; but most of all determined your beauty. For centuries the closer you were to whiteness the better off you’d be. And sometime after the civil war ended tha development of tha so-called Blue Vein Society began. Members of this clique were of black background and in order to be a member of this group one’s skin tone had to be light enough for their blue veins to be visible.Tha terms association also had to deal with blue blood, privilege, and beauty. This also left darker skinned blacks at a lesser social scale.Similarly, tha same tactics were used in the early 1900’s for thousands of establishments, including universities and churches to decide if a black person was white enough to gain acceptance; famously known as the brown paper bag test.
A brown paper bag was used to see if an individual’s skin was the same color or lighter than tha brown bag to be inclusive of tha organization.But what did it mean to tha black community post-segregation? Tha embedding continued even at tha turn of tha century and beyond on tha T.V. screen, tha runway, commercials, music and other forms of media and especially in tha streets. Caucasian culture was projected onto you constantly. And it did its job, leaving their ideas of what was considered beautiful to tha black community. Black men and black women desired light skin whether it was a characteristic on a partner or an attribute they wanted for themselves famously known as yellow and red bones.
Although tha need to change one’s skin wasn’t as severe, tha ideal transcended the U.S.A. for blacks, as 70% of tha population of some cities in West Africa used bleaching cream.Many generations of children can remember growing up and being made fun of for having dark skin or being associated with an African because African was thought of as a negative thing.Then tha questioning began; asking a sister what she was mixed with because she had “good” hair. Good hair meant your hair was loosely curled, silky or anything opposite of kinky. Some would even say asking what a black person was mixed with was thought of as a compliment; because a pretty face equated to having European features and insinuating her beauty stemmed from her non-black side.
When it came to Hollywood numerous amounts of dark-skinned people declined for roles even if it were for an all-black cast. Some black T.V. shows and movies often promoted lighter skinned women as more attractive. Some conspiracy theorists would say they would purposely hire a non-attractive dark skin woman and hire an attractive light skinned woman to prove these points. Just look at Aunt Vivian on “Tha Fresh Prince of Bel-air”, one-minute tha aunt was dark skinned and the next she was replaced by a fair-skinned woman; if anything why not replace her with a woman that resembled the original cast member? Or perhaps the undertone comparisons made on the sitcom “Martin” between Gina and Pam.Fortunately, a breakthrough has surrendered to tha black community in all areas to recognize tha beauty in our dark-skinned brothers and sisters. Black women and men have taken advantage of many platforms to acknowledge our diverse beauty on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, magazines and tha big screen. But not to just glamorize our darkness, nor our lightness because one isn’t better than tha other; but to glamorize beauty for what it was, regardless of tha form of black that it took.
It about time we stopped allowing tha media to push what they thought was attractive and we start pushing back. As we close that void of trying to conceal our unique attributes that much of the world admires and thanking each other to waking up to our conscious selves, we are deprogramming tha ideals of western European thoughts and reclaiming and defining our own.
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