Colorism and Racism in the U S

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 blacks in a positive way for once and showed blacks and whites living in harmony. 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 TV shows and as the heads of movements like Women’s Liberation so long as they were pretty and attractive. In other words, women still had to be eye candy for men. Thus, Gloria Steinem made the perfect leader of feminism as she had the looks of a Hollywood actress. Similarly, black Americans had to be depicted as fair-colored and light-skinned in order to be acceptable in the media.
Michael Jackson was a celebrated black musician who became virtually white-skinned over time. Prince was another example of a very light-skinned black person who received a lot of media attention. By only allowing blacks with light-skin color to emerge as leaders of the African American community, the ruling classes kept a lid on the rising political and social frustrations among the black community, stifling their anger and connecting violent extremism with dark-skinned African Americans like those featured in hip hop rap or in groups like the Black Panthers.
Thus, race and gender continued to be issues that were controlled by the ruling class as the power structure demanded that only certain types of women and certain types of African Americans be allowed to put ideas forward in popular media. For a black musician to become popular, he had to literally don “white face” as Michael Jackson did. Prince fell under the spell of the 80s glamorization of androgyny and thus became gender-less in his approach to selling himself, eventually renouncing his name entirely and adopting a symbol that looked like a cross between the symbol for man and the symbol for woman. This type of presentation was acceptable for the ruling classes because it kept people divided and issues from becoming seriously addressed.
By organizing an approach to colorism and gender and structuring it into society by way of the media, the power structure in the U.S. was able to control the narrative of color and the politics of identity in a way that benefitted its own continuation. The power structure has never fully been challenged for this reason because it prevents all discourse from ever evolving beyond the surface issue of race and gender. It forces all discuss to think in terms of narrow identifiers and labels instead of actually looking at culture, which is where the sociological perspective ultimately has to come to rest.
In conclusion, the sociology of colorism and gender issues shows that the social construct of bias is rooted in the way the ruling class has used the media to present acceptable figures of the black community and of the female population. Women must always be attractive because of the needs of the male gaze and blacks must always be fair-skinned to be positive as dark-skinned blacks are used to evoke feelings of fear and insecurity, as has generally been the case since the arrival of Capra’s Negro Soldier in mid-century America.
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.