Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone

Margaret L. Hunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136074905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone tackles the hidden yet painful issue of colorism in the African American and Mexican American communities. Beginning with a historical discussion of slavery and colonization in the Americas, the book quickly moves forward to a contemporary analysis of how skin tone continues to plague people of color today. This is the first book to explore this well-known, yet rarely discussed phenomenon.

1

COLORSTRUCK

If you're white you're alright, if you're brown stick around, if you're yellow you're mellow, if you're black get back! Light, bright, and almost white. Blue-black. African. La güera. La prieta. La morena. India. La negrita. Colorstruck.

The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. This saying, unlike many others, promises an even sweeter inside for a person with dark brown skin and suggests that darker skin is actually more desirable than light. This book investigates the nature of skin tone in the African American¹ and Mexican American² communities and uncovers the hidden benefits and penalties for both light and dark skin. Ultimately, this book will assess whether the sentiment of the blacker the berry is illusion or reality.

Most Americans are familiar with problems of racial discrimination in the United States. African Americans and Mexican Americans have made great progress in combating persistent racial discrimination whether encountered in housing, education, the work place, or other areas. Hidden within the process of racial discrimination, is the often overlooked issue of colorism. Lighter-skinned African Americans and Mexican Americans enjoy substantial privileges that are still unattainable to their darker-skinned brothers and sisters.³ Colorism is a problem affecting all Americans. Although typically described as a “black” or “Chicano” problem, colorism is practiced by whites and people of color alike. Given the opportunity, many people will hire a light-skinned person before a dark-skinned person of the same race, or choose to marry a lighter-skinned woman rather than a darker-skinned woman.⁴

Even the federal government is becoming increasingly concerned with color-based discrimination. “The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] … says it is handling more color-discrimination complaints pitting blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and others against members of their own race or ethnic group.”⁵ In the early 1990s, the EEOC typically received less than 500 complaints of color-bias per year. By 2002, the number had nearly tripled to 1,400 complaints of color-bias. This explosion may be related to increasing cases of discrimination, and it may also be evidence of increasing awareness that color-based discrimination is not only wrong, it's illegal.

Many cases of color-based discrimination have ended up in the courts. In 2002, the EEOC sued the owners of a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio, Texas for color-based discrimination. A white manager at the restaurant claimed that the owners directed him to hire only light-skinned staff to work in the dining room. The EEOC won the case and the restaurant was forced to pay $100,000 in fines.⁶ In 2003, a dark-skinned African American won a claim of $40,000 from a national restaurant chain for color-based discrimination from a fellow black employee. The plaintiff argued that he suffered constant taunting and color-based epithets about his dark skin from lighter-skinned African American co-workers.⁷ These are just two examples of how colorism affects people of color on a daily basis. Most people of color will not end up in court over color bias, but all people of color will experience or witness unfair treatment because of a person's skin tone.

Sociological research reveals that lighter-skinned African Americans and Mexican Americans earn more money, complete more years of education, live in more integrated neighborhoods, and have better mental health than do darker-skinned African Americans and Mexican Americans.⁸ The long history of skin color stratification for both of these groups has its roots in their colonization and enslavement by Europeans. Europeans and white Americans created racial hierarchies to justify their subhuman treatment of the people of color they colonized and enslaved. This was the beginning of the ideology of white supremacy. The alleged superiority of whiteness, and all things approximating it including white or light skin, was the rule.

White racism is the fundamental building block of colorism, or skin color stratification, among Mexican Americans and African Americans. The maintenance of white supremacy in this country is predicated on the notion that dark skin represents savagery, irrationality, ugliness, and inferiority. White skin, and thus whiteness itself, is defined by the opposite: civility, rationality, beauty, and superiority.⁹ These meanings are infused into actual body types to create the system of racism as we know it today.

Racist ideology usually involves an esthetic appraisal of physical features, a mythology about traits of mind and personality correlated with physical features, and an almost mystical belief in the power of “blood” to elevate or to taint.¹⁰

Skin color and features associated with whites, such as light skin, straight noses, and long, straight hair, take on the meanings that they represent: civility, rationality, and beauty. Similarly, skin colors and features associated with Africans or Indians, such as dark skin, broad noses, and kinky hair, represent savagery, irrationality, and ugliness. The values associated with physical features set the stage for skin color stratification.

This study of color bias is further complicated by its simultaneous attention to sexism. I examine how skin color stratification specifically affects African American and Mexican American women in the areas of income, education, and the marriage market. This book allows the voices of real women to reveal how skin color has affected their lives as they describe the often, private hurt and pain on both sides of the color line. One woman I interviewed describes her frustration with men of color and their perceptions of beauty.

In terms of models and catalogs, there are no black women, only white women…. I guess they're [black and Latino men] attracted to white women. I think they like more long hair, light eyes, lighter complexion. I know some Latino guys say, “I don't want no indigenous looking girl.” Black guys are like, “I don't really like dark girls unless they have long hair.” But not a lot of dark girls are going to have long hair. That's white girls. I think they like a lighter, closer to white variety of females.

Skin color bias creates many painful experiences for women of color, especially darker-skinned women. This has led many women to try to alter their appearances through skin bleaching creams, make-up application, use of colored contact lenses, dieting, hair straightening and hair extensions, and even cosmetic surgery. Many of these procedures have the effect of whitening or Anglicizing a woman's appearance in order to make her more “beautiful.”¹¹

In fact, the pursuit of light skin color can be so important it can prove fatal. A Harvard Medical School researcher found outbreaks of mercury poisoning in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Tanzania, and the southwestern United States. He came to learn that the poisoning, found almost exclusively in women, was caused by the widespread use of skin-bleaching creams containing toxic levels of mercury.¹² Children, too, suffered—either from in utero absorption during pregnancy, or from mothers who put the bleaching cream on their children eager for them to have the benefits of light skin, the more valued complexion.

Noted social scientist Vicki Ruiz describes the pressure from inside and outside of the Mexican American community for young women to pursue beauty and to wear cosmetics.

The use of cosmetics, however, cannot be blamed entirely on Madison Avenue ad campaigns. The innumerable barrio beauty pageants, sponsored by mutualistas, patriotic societies, churches, the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, newspapers, and even progressive labor unions, encouraged young women to accentuate their physical attributes.¹³

Ruiz provides a persuasive example of the power of beauty to structure the lives of women. Her long list of Mexican organizations that support the ideology of beauty is alarming, especially because it includes organizations such as “churches” and “progressive labor unions.” Her description of the pursuit of beauty, often in the name of ethnic pride (at ethnic festivals and celebrations), illustrates the inherent contradictions between racial pride and a pursuit of beauty than valorizes whiteness.

In her essay about young black women and their beauty attitudes and practices, sociologist Maxine Leeds describes the contradictory position many young black women find themselves in.

These students frequently stated that there was a beauty standard that valued lighter skin and longer and straighter hair. They distanced themselves from that standard and articulated a more inclusive idea of beauty. Yet their own taunts about skin color and hair length indicate that they, to some degree, accept a Eurocentric ideal.¹⁴

She describes her interview participants as able to see beauty in traditionally black identities including dark skin color and short, natural hair, but it seems as if they have not completely released the power of the white ideal of beauty.¹⁵ They stand outside of a white cultural ideal, yet they have internalized it. When Leeds asked the young women if there was anything they would change about their appearance, most responded with wanting longer hair, lighter skin or lighter eyes—all traits associated with whites and not blacks.

Another way in which sexism interacts with racism is in its structuring of the marriage market. Women learn to compete with one another for men in the marriage marketplace. Women compete with one another over many traits including educational credentials, income, family status, and perhaps most importantly, beauty. Skin color is closely tied to the definition of beauty such that light-skinned or white women are considered more “beautiful” than darker-skinned women of color.¹⁶ In this way, beauty works as a form of social capital for women. Beauty is capital because it is transformable into other types of capital, such as economic capital or money.¹⁷ The amount of beauty a woman possesses may help her land a well-paying job or marry a high-status, wealthy man.

But what about the Black is Beautiful movement and the Brown Pride movement? In the 1960s and 1970s many African Americans and Mexican Americans were involved in cultural revolutions that inverted the racist norms of white beauty and celebrated brown skin, African and Indian features, and natural hair. These movements were significant and were part and parcel of the larger struggles for political and economic rights. It was common to hear young Chicanos referring to “Aztec Goddesses” and young blacks to “Nubian Princesses.” But this burgeoning aesthetic, though influential, did not create a substantial permanent change in American culture. Blacks and Chicanos will forever be imprinted with the proud messages of those days, but many of those values have become more talk than reality as skin-bleaching creams continue to be used and facial cosmetic surgery is on the rise among people of color.

How are lighter and darker women affected by their skin tone in the worlds of work, education, and the marriage market? Resources are allocated unequally to light and dark-skinned women and beauty is constructed to elevate the status of light-skinned black and Mexican American women who most closely physically resemble whites. Skin color, racial, and gender hierarchies all work at the ideological level to construct beauty as a tool of patriarchy and racism. Because beauty is an ideology, its standards serve the interests of dominant social groups. In this case beauty is a hegemonic ideology and its existence serves the interests of whites in that it maintains white privilege. Beauty as an ideology also serves the interests of men because it maintains patriarchy as it divides women through competition and reduces their power.

The ideology of beauty is linked to ideologies of competence and intelligence. In a public sphere still debating racial differences in intelligence,¹⁸ racial images that signify who “looks smart” are heavily influenced by race, gender, and skin color. People with light skin and Anglo features, usually associated with rationality and civility, are more likely to be perceived as intelligent and competent than are individuals with skin colors and features associated with Africans or Indians and thus associated with savagery, and incompetence.¹⁹

The status characteristics of race, color, and gender also work at the material level as they affect educational outcomes, income differences, and occupational characteristics of individuals and groups. Often through the ideological work discussed above, women are discriminated against both overtly and covertly in the worlds of work and education. For example, a light-skinned Mexican American woman is viewed by other Mexican Americans and by whites as higher status, less racially conscious (and therefore less threatening), more “respectable,” and more assimilable than her darker-skinned counterparts. These perceptions give her a competitive edge in schools and job markets still tainted by racism.

On average, women, earn less money than men; people of color earn less than whites, and darker-skinned people of color earn less than lighter-skinned people of color. I will examine how these three social facts interact and make it so that darker-skinned Mexican American and African American women earn less, learn less, and marry those with less, than do their lighter, whiter counterparts.

WHY STUDY SKIN COLOR?

Most sociological research on racism focuses on the position of various racial and ethnic groups relative to whites. Although that point is integral to this book, I will go further by showing how lighter-skinned people of color are privileged over darker-skinned people of color within racial/ ethnic groups. In the case of skin color stratification within the black and Mexican American communities, white racism is the fundamental building block of that stratification, just as it is for stratification across the racial groups of white, black, Latino, Indian, Asian, and others.

The privilege of light-skinned African American and Mexican American women does not operate in the same way that race privilege operates for whites, but privilege operates nonetheless. I will describe the mechanisms of that system and their similarities and differences in both ethnic communities. When Spike Lee wrote and directed the film School Daze, which dealt with issues of skin color and black identity on a college campus, he was met with both praise and contempt. Many people thanked him for bringing to light the often hidden issue of colorism and sparking a larger public discussion of the topic. Others criticized him for “airing dirty laundry” and distracting the public from the more important issue of racial discrimination. I strongly believe that discussing skin color bias in the Mexican American and African American communities does not distract us from the important matter of racial discrimination. In fact, skin color stratification supports the contention that racial discrimination is alive and well, and so insidious that communities of color themselves are divided into quasi-racial hierarchies. Without a larger system of institutional racism, colorism based on skin tone would not exist. Colorism is part and parcel of racism and exists because of it.

How does a person with light skin end up with more education, a higher income, and a higher status spouse than a person with the same background characteristics, but with darker skin? This book attempts to answer that question by examining the history of racism and skin color bias, examining how skin tone affects women's income, educational attainment, and spouse's status, and uncovering how skin tone is tied to definitions of beauty and ethnic authenticity.

Systems of discrimination operate on at least two levels in terms of race and color. The first system of discrimination is the level of racial category (i.e., black, Asian, Indian, etc.). The second system of discrimination is at the level of skin tone—darker skin or lighter skin. These two systems of discrimination work in concert in white, black, and Chicano communities. Racism and colorism are responsible for discrimination against people because of their racial or ethnic identity, as well as for discrimination against dark-skinned people of color, and the privileging of light-skinned people of color. These two systems are distinct, but inextricably connected, because a light-skinned Mexican American woman may still experience racism, despite her light skin, and a dark-skinned Mexican Am...