Argumentative Essay On Colorism

Famous author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker is credited to be the first person to coin the term “colorism.” She defined the word as the “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same race people based solely on their color.”i When searching for the root of the issue the institution of slavery never fails to be mentioned in the conversation. Of course it is obvious that the New World can not take credit for inventing slavery, but it certainly took on a life of its own to the point that the term became synonymous to the word black.

In the United States, tobacco was the main source that drove the economy for hundreds of years starting as early as the 15th century. Caucasians weren 't going to harvest the tobacco so they needed to find

One women in the documentary Dark Girls recalls a story of when she was in the car with her mother and her mother 's friend and her mother was bragging about the beauty of her daughter. She goes on to tell the story: “she said, ‘My daughter is beautiful. She’s got great eyelashes, she’s got the cheekbones, she’s got great lips, Could you imagine if she had any lightness in her skin at all? She’d be gorgeous."viii At that moment the women realized that her skin color was a problem. No girl ever wants to feel unloved or unwanted especially because of the skin color that she was born with, but sadly that is the case in today 's society. Colorism starts at a very early age and the results can be devastating, or as Iyanla Vanzant says in the documentary Light Girls that that treatment "leaves scars on the soul that live well into womanhood."ix This leaves a girl to ask herself where is her identity if mainstream society allows her to feel

They constantly have to cater to answering the question "so what are you?" "There 's a safety in being able to categorize you, or categorize a person. You can assign all of your preconceived ideas about who this person is: the type of person they are, what kind of behavior you can expect from them, only if you know what they are,"x actress Tatyana Ali goes on to explain. Finding your identity whiting the black community is tougher then it seems. There 's no guardian in front of a gate who gets to say whether one is black enough to enter through, but who gets to decide who is black enough and who isn 't. In her book Color Matters Kimberly Jade Norwood does further investigation on this idea and coins the term "blackthink." According to her findings "blackthink" attempts to define what it means to be black and rejects anything that does not fit into the definition."xi Dark skinned women are criticized for not being pretty enough according to society 's expectations because black has always had a negative connotation attached to it historically. Meanwhile lighter skinned women are viewed as imposters to because they aren 't pure in skin color. Norwood goes to mention that "blacks who do not live as blacks are