Colorism: definitions, impacts, and social implications

Colorism

The idea that the amount of racism and discrimination that a minority person faces depends, in part, upon how much a person looks like a member of the dominant group is not a new one. India's strict caste system, though largely abandoned, continues to designate some people as better than others, and though its proponents will say that it is based in traditional jobs and family history, it is clear that the more menial the caste, the darker-skinned its members. Moreover, the vestiges of colonialism can be found in most of the countries in the Americas, which all spent time as European colonies. After all, racism based on the degree of one's blackness is a widely-acknowledged part of American history. While some states concluded that people with any proportion of African-American ancestry were black (and thus, slaves), other states defined blacks as people having a certain percentage of African-American history. Louisiana may have been the most specific of those states, recognizing quadroons (people with 1/4 African-American ancestry) and octoroons (people with 1/8 African-American ancestry). In addition, many states, most notably Louisiana, had large groups of free "coloreds;" people who were of mixed white and black ancestry. Though these "colored" people did not have the same rights as whites, they were also not subjected to the same degree of degradation as their blacker counterparts. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that people still experience colorism.

What may be a surprise is that I believe that colorism is a natural response to a period of colonial oppression. This is not to suggest that I believe that colorism is appropriate; race-based discrimination is wrong, even when it is done by members of one's same racial minority or on the basis of degrees of racial "purity." However, when one looks at systems of colonial oppression, one sees that colorism is an almost-inevitable by-product of those systems. Moreover, differences in colorism, such as the differing approaches to race in the United States vs. most of Latin America, can be traced back to the different types of colonialism practiced in those different countries.

The basic thrust of colonialism was an assumption of superiority by the colonizing groups. Not only were they taking land and other resources from native persons, but they were doing so in a disingenuous manner, under the guise that they were somehow civilizing the natives and helping them by taking their land. When that assumption of superiority is missing, then colonialism does not exist. On the contrary, those land battles become outright wars, with the targeted people on-notice that they are going to be subject to harassment and hostility. Colonialism is different. Colonizing countries approached the peoples of new lands under the guise of friendship, and then engaged in mass slaughter and domination of those peoples. Moreover, they engaged in various practices to keep indigenous people from revolting against colonial rule. For example, Europeans established extensive colonies in Africa, and the role of those colonies is largely downplayed in modern discussions of slavery and its causes. While it is true that the first African slaves were purchased from other Africans and included people guilty of some societal wrong-doing, or perhaps the losers in wars, the mythology of the African slave-trader has obscured the fact that colonizing Europeans played a pivotal role in the slave-trade. They provided significant sums of money to African slave-traders, and were not hesitant to provide non-financial incentives to slave-traders, as well. One of the reasons that colonists did this was to remove native Africans from areas in Africa that they sought to colonize, rather than using an indigenous workforce. In fact, it is well-noted that the English brought Indians to Africa as a workforce. The reason for the imported workforce was to remove people from the familiar, making it likely that they would be more complacent. The imported people became the lowest caste under colonialism, and, because their appearance differed from any of the surrounding groups, it was easy to identify who they were.

At first, intermixing between slave and master was undoubtedly met with shame, humiliation, and rage, since such children were the result of rape. However, since the percentage of men who will knowingly commit incest is lower than the percentage of men who will commit rape of any female, the female products of these rapes may have seen an improvement in their circumstances, when compared to other enslaved females. Therefore, the preference for lighter color begins, as mothers notice that their lighter-skinned children are treated a little more favorably than their darker-skinned children. This is not to suggest that lighter-skinned slaves were not treated in an abominable manner, nor that all lighter-skinned slaves received preferential treatment, but there was certainly enough of a difference to make mother's notice this. In fact, the supposed difference in I.Q. between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks has been proven to be attributable to differences in environment, rather than genetics, supporting the theory that light-skinned blacks received some degree of preferential treatment.