The hatred of dark skin explained | On The Cards - BBC

apparently there were a lot of people in the uk who were very unhappy that somebody light skinned was doing this documentary malcolm x's famous speech like who taught you to hate yourself if she didn't tell me to stop i probably would be nowhere near the shade i am now hey everyone i'm audrey this is tan france hello today we are talking about colorism and this is on the cards [Music] joining us on the couch we have hema gracie princess shira and last but not least tan france who investigates the extent of colorism in the black and asian community now tan yes let's talk about this documentary first of all it was brilliant what inspired you to actually make this documentary first and foremost i had a child last year and we knew we were going to start the process of having a baby and i really wanted to make sure that my child didn't experience what i experienced as a kid and so i wanted to be able to say to my kid in many years time daddy did all he could to try and at least open up a conversation and try and negate some of the issues we've all probably experienced on this panel absolutely you know one of the things i really loved about it was how informed the students were yeah because when i was growing up i knew colorism was a thing but i didn't know the word yeah so the fact that they could define it so well was absolutely incredible at such a young age i don't think we had the exposure to really understand globally what that meant and the kids nowadays with them all on gosh knows what social media they have education that we just didn't have as kids i'm saying we i know you're all much younger than i um but yeah i have that as a kid what do we all define as colourism i would say that colorism is the hatred of dark skin and rooted in anti-blackness it's systemic but it's towards darker skinned people and i think that's where the confusion comes in um i suppose the thing about colorism is that although the hatred and the the worst effects of colorism are going to be felt by dark skinned women it benefits no one even if you think you're benefiting from light skin privilege which you are in many ways that's not necessarily a positive thing what i'm hearing you say is that regardless of your skin tone a person of color will experience colorism i think that it's a damaging message to say that if you are light-skinned it negates colorism that isn't the case at all i feel like it's really important to really understand the definition of colorism because colorism that word is about the treatment of darker skin and like saying that as a lighter skinned person you'll experience colorism it's kind of like when people say reverse racism some people say reverse colorism it doesn't exist like you you do get discriminated in your own ways like no one's trying to ever take that away from you and it's not like a competition like well you've gone i've gone through this and you don't know can i add something when um a light-skinned person gets told to stay out of the sun they're being told to stop the sun to maintain their like complexion when a dark skinned person is told to stay out of the sun we're told that we don't want to get darker i got told that it's not like um we're ever trying to take anything away from other people's experiences but to define certain experiences our colorism if that's not the definition we need to make that clear [Music] so we're going to delve a little bit deeper into the conversation shira i'm going to ask you to do the honours if you pick up a card and then you're going to read the statement on the card and then we're just going to talk about the statement there have been times i have not felt accepted because of the shade of my skin i don't think i've ever not been accepted but i grew up in essex so i went to a predominantly white school and so i definitely think i faced colorism amongst like my non-black friends so there was this idea that all the non-blacks kind of stuck together and within that space i was like the least desired so that was my personal experience does anybody want to talk about i don't like seeing women i don't want to like make this the universal like it's phrased but i have tried to bleach my skin before yeah when i was like 10 which watching your documentary was the guilt you felt um like an expressed is something i've sort of reckoned with and i remember sitting in the bath and like just scrubbing because my sister's slightly lighter than me she has slightly more afro-centric features although even afro-centric eurocentric features i think is a whole thing it's a whole nother thing it's a whole nother thing i always wanted to be as light as possible not because i didn't want to be black but it was because i wasn't black enough to relate to my black family i wasn't white enough to raise my white family but i was living with my white family going to majority white schools and i recognized that white people were considered beautiful and they were getting the jobs all this stuff you know what's interesting is that you have suggested i wasn't as dark so therefore my experience probably wasn't as bad i wonder should any of you feel like you don't have a right to talk about colorism or feel that guilt or feel those experiences just because you feel you're not as dark as somebody to the nth degree there's a term that is not being used and i think it's proximity to whiteness yeah right people need to also not stop looking at themselves and their identity as a definite like you're not purely just depressed and you're not just purely privileged i could be in a room full of light-skinned people in that space i carry more proximity to blackness so therefore i'm going to be more oppressed right but then i could be in a room full of dark-skinned black people with afrocentric features and hair textures and i could be the same complexion but the difference is i have the privilege me addressing it right now doesn't take away any of the experience that i face but choosing to only see one aspect of my identity and experiences is gonna harm further marginalized people so when i was younger like you can see now i had eczema everywhere so it was doctors that gave me cream to lighten the dark marks and i started using the lightening cream and my mom said to me princess you need to slow down like you're getting really light like i don't like it and my mom's a light-skinned nigerian woman so when she said that i was like ooh hit the money i'm like i don't need to get bleaching cream i'll just keep using this i was using it everywhere i'm like i finally look like my mom i look like the girls that schooled and then i ran out but then my doctor we went back to her to get the cream and she was like i don't want you using that anymore like you look a completely different shade after that i was really like sad like oh why can i get lighter like i want to be lighter i didn't go to a predominantly white school but you could count the black kids on your fingers and they literally ignored me and the light-skinned girls the mixed girls everyone got that attention and it's not like i craved the attention but i was like it doesn't feel nice to be ignored i kept getting this comment oh you're dark but you're not too dark oh you're pretty for a dark-skinned girl my mom she had like some hyper pigmentation and i started taking her hyperpigmentation cream to like lighten my skin and i was like why am i doing this obviously my skin's not changing i can't change it like just let it go then i get to high school this boy we were hanging out my light-skinned mixed race best friend was sitting next to me i was here and he was over there and he was like princess you know if you were white you'd be one of the hottest girls in school and i was like what i was angry but i was also like wow he like validated my insecurities and it was like i can't believe that people find me attractive or find me interesting but i'm not the right shade then i was like let me give bleaching one more last try and my mom came to me she's like princess you better not touch that cream you don't need it like your skin is beautiful like why are you trying to change it and after that i just went on this like really long self-love journey of like you need to know you're okay no matter what people say to you no matter how they feel about you do you think if you didn't have such a loving and supportive mom you would have found that radical self-love so quickly i'm sorry it's okay it is i love my mom that's why it's making me cry we love your mom too she sounds great no my mom uh my mom is a very confident nigerian woman like if she didn't tell me to stop i probably would be nowhere near the shade i am now and i do give credit to her because she's always told me i'm beautiful but when you constantly get comments and no's and rejection it physically and mentally affects you if it wasn't for my mom and like finally finding like a dark-skinned friend that could relate to me i don't think i would be where i am today and then i see representation in the media other people like you're gorgeous like dark skinned you're gorgeous like dark skinned black women for me was like i'm gorgeous too [Music] so many of the comments that i got when we announced that we were doing this documentary i was talking about how much i hated skin bleaching products i was encouraged to use them as a child and the amount of people from other countries not the west were saying you don't understand you're trying to take this away from us we need this if i don't use this i will not succeed in life i feel like those kind of comments are from what they see in their media like i know even in like south korea they use screen bleaching and like blac chyna was promoting one of the products and stuff kima said it was education yeah literally that's what helped me yeah like when i was in school we went back to nigeria like 2008 and seeing my cousins my family with skin like mine just thriving people on the in the markets calling them beautiful and i'm like why am i getting treated like that over there and over here it's like beauty you know i personally believe that bleaching cream should be completely taken away but i think it all comes down to like radical education not stuff you know having it shoved in your face what even taught me to love my dark skin and my tamonas was actually learning a lot about black liberation groups and the reality is even the spaces that we have is because black people paved the way for us malcolm x's famous speech like who taught you to hate yourself it was asking that question to you i get it you know asking that question to myself [Music] okay so i think it's time for another card i'm going to ask hemmer the shade of your skin can be a factor on success well duh um so when you think about the wide audience in the world you know or even the people that are allowing us to be viewed by the audience so the production companies whatever when you think this is run by especially here in the uk it's going to be white people mostly so they often pick people who they're a bit more comfortable with they feel like more palatable to a white audience one thing i love about how life is nowadays is you can't even deny the black audience or the asian audience you'll see us on social media on our own platforms and we're clearly winning we clearly have the views so they catch on a bit later we'll just charge you ten times more one thing you said is that we are creating our own content but that is a very recent thing yeah so historically up until the last few years literally the last few years you are right we weren't in control no literally we have to wait for someone to put us on and then if they do put us on it's going to be a certain kind of character if you're if it's a tv show and there's a light-skinned main character her dark-skinned best friend is the loud one the the one with the attitude i was going to say i think a good example is issa insecure like we didn't have to have a struggle story we didn't have to have like a stereotype when we have those stories of us just being human beings it gives us a sense of okay i can relate to that but with success for me personally when i was doing modeling and i was the only black girl the casting or i wasn't dark enough i even shaved my head off like i'm like what's the model look you want you know so that's it that's the way you're trying to go exactly you know so and like i wasn't dark enough like i'm dark skinned but i wasn't the south sudanese kind of dark skin that they wanted you know what i mean so i think there's a certain type of person they want i want to know do you think that when they're casting for white models their concerns are about their skin tone also absolutely not maybe freckles ginger hair brunette shortcut blonde but never their skin we were talking about casting and that led me onto a question i wanted to ask you gracie because you're in the world of acting so how does all of this play out in your field um one thing that you mentioned that i sort of wanted to pick up on was the idea of like a user-friendly black person right and i'm very aware of the fact that i'm mixed race and i am user-friendly black every situation has a block never heard that that's a new term i'm stealing that gym please steal it because it's something it's something that actually first white people used about me because i throughout my entire life i've been in like majority white supremacists what during that conversation did you slap that person oh my [Laughter] trust me if god throwing the amount of hands i wanted to throw i'd be away for gbh like going into any casting environment i know that because as you mentioned in the films it's always the light-skinned girl i know that i'm catering to that but even then i still feel bad about oh i'm not going to get cast because i'm i'm black or whatever or this or that but i know that technically on the spectrum i'm still doing all right then on top of that you sort of mentioned the idea of being the right kind of dark-skinned girl and without being like oh my god nights and girls have problems too like i don't want to sound like that but i think there is a specific type of mixed race girl that everybody wants like i will never be skinny skinny like i will never be that girl i will never have green eyes you know i will never always have the perfect curls despite whatever hair extensions i use whatever so i feel like there's still this ridiculously high standard for mixed-race women like you've got to be the perfect one otherwise you know you're not it so shira i wanted to ask you a question actually because i'm nosy and i like to be in people's business so word on the street is that you were involved in beyonce's brown-skinned girl like yeah i just think like like like my face that was like my whole face and that song is so important talk to us about that like your participation and your involvement in it okay so first of all i have to like state like brown skin girl the song is always going to be for black women and it's always going to be an afrocentric song and i think that that's so beautiful to celebrate that as a dark-skinned tamil person you know coming from a south asian community that is further marginalized it was really important for me to represent the tamil community so like even from the way that i had my hair to the type of jewelry i wanted it to be identifiable to tamil kids when it first came out the amount of time well kids were like that's a tamil killer like that's the cat like because growing up so much of the south asian people that i did see were light-skinned punjabi north indians and obviously there's a lot of anti-tamilness that exist within those communities and i faced a lot of anti-tamilness and colorism that was directed towards me i was also there seeing a lot of like punjabi north indian kids the same communities of people that also oppressed me they were like oh my god south asian representation i was like i'm gonna have to reel it back yeah yeah yeah because first of all first of all you know what i mean i had to remind them like i don't mind you you know being uplifted by that representation but for so long using tamil ethnic people as an insult and all of a sudden now i break into mainstream you want to claim me as that so it was addressing that but also then on a wider scale telling south asians like look at what black women are doing for us and our you know film industries can't even pick someone that looks like me so first of all thank you black women [Music] okay so we're going to pick up the final card gracie if you wouldn't mind reading what's on the back of it and we can discuss the shade of my skin has impacted me financially yeah yeah it's really impacted me um so i'm at oxford um which coffee i love saying that but before i was even like yay i'm in oxford i was like is this because i'm just a light-skinned girl who can go into an interview sound relatively posh and like black my way in there and they need the stats even when i was applying to oxford quite honestly i chose christchurch college which is like meant to be the precious biggest baddest kind of college because i'll fit what they need and what they want don't you think it's crazy that you have to think about these things though that's that's wild but sorry just to touch on that but i think that a lot of these spaces wouldn't still have even people like me in their building if it wasn't for social media and us making noise about the fact that we're not in these spaces i would definitely say that my skin tone has affected me financially especially maybe in the beginning of my career and then even now like i'll see someone who i don't think they have done as much as me and no not not to like no no no it's i might be doing something might be some kind of advertisement and then i'll go on to their page and i'll see they're done the same advertisement and i've seen that what they've done is barely any effort we shouldn't be on the same page but how much did you get paid thing and that's really important actually because there was there was something about the influence of pay gap right and the differences between you know your white counterparts your mixed counterparts versus the darker-skinned um counterparts and the disparities in what we're paid it's absolutely insane they say something yeah not my quote so you know i want something like but mediocrity is not a privilege that we have as dark-skinned people and it's so true i have gone into a lot of even like south asian spaces again dominated by the more palatable north indian punjabi communities right and seeing the and i have to be very honest seeing the most basic people do their basic stuff but i have to go into every space and be a go about yeah be the top of my game they don't understand that in that situation they are the white people they can walk in they can be basic even to the point of how they dress i walk into a room and obviously all eyes on me but as i'm saying that i'm looking around i'm like where are the other dark-skinned people where are the other tamil kids in here we've talked a lot about women do you feel that there is a justification for black men darker-skinned men to feel the same way in our documentary we feature a young black man who was bleaching so so heavily yeah that made me cry yeah i saw that i understand him very well like you get treated differently the moment your shade changes and for me when i saw the pictures of his hands that's when i broke i was like that could have been me yeah for him as a dark-skinned man he will feel everything that we feel for dark-skinned women we are masculized and we're also seen as aggressive angry for them people are scared of them you know how lights can do that how dark skinned dudes act like and they have those skits you know what i mean so like they will feel it and for them as men where are their spaces to talk about that they should have that opportunity to have their own conversation as well and just to add on to that i think it's true i think that anyone ultimately that's dark skin is gonna face some sort of colorism but i do think at the same time the conversation about black men is a little bit nuanced because they can also be the beneficiaries of colorism because sometimes black men have projected colorism onto us and made us feel less than so much darker than you making you exactly exactly and i've heard all kinds of horrible things and i guess that's the sadness about colorism is that it's intra-communal right like it happens within the community [Music] what kind of final thoughts do we all have about how we can dismantle this and make it better for the future me as a dark skinned woman i'm never going to change anything about my skin so that people can see me in my entirety and look at me and know that they can get to these type of spaces also when i see issues happening like this is why sometimes i don't really like being on camera too much i said to someone oh the lighting's a bit off or whatever and they said to me oh don't blame the camera but i saw it and i said you know what when i own my production company we're going to have people who know how to light up black people properly so i won't have this problem so it's just like just even be mindful of the issues and knowing that you can change it and again even us not just all supporting each other when you get into a space and you can do something for a dark skinned girl you know how will we go through you know we have to try extra hard yeah hire me and pay me more definitely here i couldn't agree more princess what do you think um having a representation of us just as like insecure and stuff like molly and how to get away with murder when she's taking the wig off and like she's just crying and just being human i think that allows vulnerability in like seeing us just as people and systematically i just feel like i've said this all the time you got to break the system and rebuild it back up we can't change a system that wasn't made for us so i don't think changing things system systemically will work unless there's a new system built in terms of like actually dismantling i'm not the right person to ask and as a datsun woman i don't think it's on the oppressed to have to fix the problem exactly everybody else around you exactly you're just existing in your beautiful dark skin and everyone else around you has the issue so it shouldn't be on dark skinned black women especially to fix the problem shira would you what do you think i think a lot of things [Laughter] um i think even the fact that right now we've had such a nuanced conversation around colorism which is really refreshing because i think so many people like to homogenize dark skin experiences and dark-skinned people like so addressing the nuances and then also going into these spaces discussing it taking away any fragility that you feel why is it that you feel fragile we are not just purely oppressed you know we all carry some kind of proximity to whiteness addressing that doesn't hurt anyone and don't be an as a light-skinned person the way that this issue is going to be solved is by taking it on like you've got to address your privilege you've got to address then how can you take this privilege and not just feel bad about it and sit at home and cry okay how am i going to be in the spaces where i can make the changes and for me as an actress and a writer if i'm writing something i'm not just going to write in like a dark-skinned best friend i'm actively going to question the placement of dark-skinned women making sure i bring dark-skinned women on my team making sure i question that dynamic myself because i'm the one in the room so i have a responsibility to make those changes you would mention that it's our responsibility as the lightest skin within our communities to be able to offer spaces for those who aren't given the opportunity and that is why we've done this documentary it would have been so easy for me to say i'm just going to represent my south asians and we're going to leave it at that i wanted to make it clear that this is a global issue for many races not just the south asian community not just the black community not just the latinx community not the various asian community i really feel that um it's important that everyone understands that they can join in the conversation feel comfortable enough to ask questions because i don't like people feeling like they have to be afraid to have the conversation i'd rather we ask all be honest and open and that's one thing i don't like a lot about social media because it seems like if you get something wrong in the public people are on to you and it's just like you got this right [Laughter] apparently there were a lot of people in the uk who were very unhappy that somebody light skinned was doing this documentary i was raised in a very white community there were even 10 people of color in my school we were one of eight families of color and so for me i was one of the darker people in my community and so i struggled through my version of colorism of course i understand that it's all relative but my experience of being judged by my color is when i say every person that's going to be doing this documentary and people say you don't have a right you're not dark enough to be able to have a seat at the table we need to understand that everyone's experiences relative do not get me wrong i'm not stupid enough to believe that my struggle is the same as a black woman's in particular especially a dark-skinned person's experience however i think we have to understand that we need to allow as you said room for conversation without judgment so we can say let's talk about it let's open up the conversation we're not saying that we all have the same experience but we if we don't talk about it it doesn't stop [Music] thank you so much everyone you can now watch tan france beauty and the bleach on bbc iplayer right now make sure you leave us a comment below and let us know your thoughts on how we can all dismantle colorism and other topics you'd like to see us discuss in the future bye this conversation is important because people who maybe feel in a similar way to how we're feeling need to understand that their feelings are valid it serves as a space where we can safely discuss the pain we felt but also how we can collectively heal and make the world hopefully a place where our children won't have to suffer a lot of people may feel guilt or shame for things they did for their dark skin and seeing and hearing that other people went through what you went through is really important i don't want to live in a world where my children feel like they can't live their best lives and best fruitful and flourish because of their complexion not all dark skin experiences are the same there's so much differences and similarities this conversation is so important because it affords us a space to have an authentic conversation that will hopefully impact some kind of change you

Channel: BBC

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Keywords: BBC iPlayer, United Kingdom, British TV, British TV Shows, Watch UK TV Online, Watch British TV Online, Watch British TV Shows Online, Audrey Indome from The Receipts, Podcast, Recieipts podcast, Colourism in the UK, Colourism, Light skin privilege

Id: ffugXNNBG1A

Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022