Is colorism still a problem? AUDIENCE: Yes. Kim, what do you-- what
do you think about that? Do you think colorism is a
problem, is still a problem? I think it is still a problem. I think it's getting better,
much better, but it's among us. You know, that's the-- [APPLAUSE] And it is. And that becomes from the
very beginning of time, because when, you know, we
had the light skinned people in the house, and
the darker you are, the further you
are in the field. So, yeah, that was--
that was ingrained in us. So we're not that
many generations away. I think it's getting better now,
like the sister with no hair, and this one right
here, dark chocolate. And you see all these
beautiful colors and we're embracing each other. You know, my mother-- I thought she was white
until I was nine years old. That's a problem. And one day, I went home, and
I was like, you white, Mama? And then she cussed me
out like she was black, so then I knew that
she was a black woman. So, and, my father
was is very dark. You know? So I had all these different
shades in my family, but we never in our family said,
like, oh, you light skinned, you brown skinned. We never had that in our family. But outside and in the
community, we have it. I went to Fisk University
and they would say, oh, you can't run for Miss
Fisk, or you too light, or you can't--
I was like, too light? What's happening here? I'm at a black college! It's us, though. It's us, I'm telling you.
- It's us. We do it to us. Yeah, it's us. And remember, I
was saying earlier, we can't expect people to
do what we have not figured out how to do ourselves. I have a father that is
blond hair and blue eyed, so what he-- he
would always tell me how the difference in them-- what was that look for? I apologize. OK, go ahead. One more time. It was judgement. I apologize. It was judge-- yeah. All right. But we do it to ourselves. We do I think we take--
we minimize things that really become big later. I'm going to bring in
a couple of folks here. The way we think about color,
the closer you are to whiteness and lightness, good. The closer you get to darkness
and black, dirty, bad. We already are black, and so
we're already labeled as dirty, bad. It's not black people's
fault that when I see the light skinned girl
that I think she's better or she got more privilege
than me, because that's what the white people tell me, that's
what these stories tell me, that's what television tells me. And so we have to think of it
with a different lens of it's not our fault. This
is what they told us, and we have to
fight against that, and think more on the grounds
of we are black people. We are people. I'm gonna come right here. Growing up, I didn't have
real good support from my mom. She was really color struck. We're the same color. And my mom did not love
her color, so growing up, I didn't know how
to love myself. I used to be the girl,
if I have to buy a weave, because if I don't, nobody
is going to like me. And now, I cut off
all of my hair, because that's something
I've always wanted to do. And I was terrified
to do it, because I was like, people are
going to hate me so much for cutting off my hair. But when I did it, I felt
so beautiful and free. Nobody could tell me
anything at that point. I was a beautiful black
woman with short hair, and you can't tell me
anything about myself. [APPLAUSE] Black people aren't
the only people that have colorism issues. I think the challenge
for the black community is that we've
internalized it and we've made it more vicious than it
has to be in today's society. There are many people on Twitter
who comment on how dark I am. I'm medium tone. I'm too dark for some,
I'm too light for others, and for a lot of
them, I'm too round. But our opportunity is
to decide who we intend to be in the space and
how we're going to treat others in that space with us. Because whether we
see the prejudice or we see the privilege,
there are those who are making decisions about us, and they are
imposing those decisions on us when they hire, when they fire,
when they send a preschooler to time out, or when they
send a teenager to prison, those choices are being made. So we can't dismiss
that it exists, but we can build the protections
around ourselves so that we aren't doing it internally. Do you think it's
changing very much? Yes, I mean, it's
absolutely getting better, because we talk about it. When you deny a problem,
you can't fix the problem. And I think what's
helpful for all of us is that we're actually talking
about this as an issue, and we're talking
about solutions. Ma'am, I'd love
to hear from you. I am light skinned, but
I have never been treated like I was white in my life. I've always been black. I've never-- I've never felt
any different from anybody else. And when I go to work,
when I went to school, I was treated like
a black woman. I was disrespected
like a black woman. So it bothers me
when people think because you're light skinned,
you're treated differently. I have never had that
advantage in my life.
