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The History of Colorism/Skin Color, Gender and the Media
The history of colorism in the U.S. and its prevalence in the media is basically the history of the U.S. and its approach to legitimate representation of race in the media. As Hunter notes, “Colorism, or skin color stratification, is a process that privileges light?skinned people of color over dark in areas such as income, education, housing, and the marriage market” (237). At the same time, media representations of darker skinned people have been viewed as being more authentic and legitimate (Hunter). This can be seen in the film The Negro Soldier, directed by famed Hollywood producer Frank Capra during WWII. In that film, the African American community was depicted for the first time as being equal to whites: the representation was authentic and legitimated by the dark skinned tone of the community. As German points out, the film was meant to “overcome racial tensions by uniting all Americans behind the war effort, while postponing African American demands for immediate equality” (67). The media in the U.S. prior to that film had been used to portray African Americans as lazy, stupid and apish: “eating watermelons, loafing, singing and dancing,” as German states (59). Cripps and Culbert note that the film made it possible for people in the U.S. to stop thinking about race as a barrier for a moment, as it showed...
Of course the purpose of the film was to get blacks to join the war effort and once the war was over, America quickly got back to its Jim Crow ways.
Following that period, it became important to use colorism as a way of continuing racist ideas. Colorism allowed the ruling classes to only allows blacks who had lighter tones to really receive attention in the media. Martin Luther King, Jr., had fairer skin than most African-Americans: he was not of a very dark black skin color, and he thus became an acceptable leader for the Civil Rights Movement. Fairer skin was associated with goodness and darker skin with degeneracy and fear.
Gender was ushered into this paradigm especially in the latter half of the 20th century when the issue of the woman’s place in the world began to be questioned. Race and gender thus became problems for the ruling class as before they had not really been issues that needed to be addressed in public. The Feminist Movement that started with the Jewish American women leaders Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem helped propel the issue of gender front and center into American politics and the sociological fabric of the modern era. Dealing with gender in the media became similar to how the ruling class dealt with race: women could be depicted as leaders and as equal to men on…
References
Cripps, Thomas and David Culbert. “The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White.” American Quarterly Vol. 31, No. 5, Special Issue: Film and American Studies (Winter, 1979), pp. 616-640: The Josh Hopkins University Press.
German, Kathleen M. Promises of Citizenship: Film Recruitment of African Americans in World War 2. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.
Hunter, M. “The persistent problem of colorism: Skin tone, status, and inequality.” Sociology Compass, 1.1. (2007), 237-254.
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