Charles Blow at the New York Times intrigued me by talking about this subject. That is the shift of the country from mostly white to mostly nonwhite. Many hold hope for this effect in the fight against white supremacy and oppression.
The most recent United States Census officially recognized five racial categories (White, Black or African American, Asian American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander) as well as people of two or more races.
The Census Bureau also classified respondents as “Hispanic or Latino” or “Not Hispanic or Latino”, identifying Hispanic and Latino as an ethnicity (not a race), which comprises the largest minority group in the nation.
For Blow, white supremacy is only one face of the problem, the other is anti-blackness. You have to fight both.
The concept of anti-blackness pushes back against the idea that all ethnic minorities have the same lived experiences and can be shoved under a singular umbrella.
For example in the United Kingdom, terms like BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) and POC (people of color) are used. While these terms can be useful in some situations, they shouldn’t be used in reference to a specific race unnecessarily. For instance, referring to a black woman as a ‘woman of color’, when you could refer to her as black, can undermine her specific lived experiences of being black.
In too many societies across the globe, where a difference in skin tone exists, the darker people are often assigned a lower caste. And, when people migrate to this country from those societies, they can bring those biases with them, underscoring that you don’t have to be white to contribute to anti-blackness.
The Pew Research Center explored colorism in the Hispanic community and underscored how anti-blackness, or anti-darkness, is no respecter of race or ethnicity. It is pervasive and portends a future in which the browning of America does not succeed in wiping away its racial prejudices. Thus Hispanics with darker skin are more likely to experience discrimination than those with lighter skin.
About two-thirds of Hispanics with darker skin colors (64%) report they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly regularly or from time to time, compared with half of those with a lighter skin tone. These differences in experiences with discrimination hold even after controlling for characteristics such as gender, age, education and whether they were born in the U.S. or abroad.
Intolerance isn’t only coming from outside the Hispanic community but also from within it.
It is clear that a majority of US Hispanics, understandably, say that too little attention is paid to race and racial issues concerning Hispanics and that Hispanics say too much attention was paid to issues concerning Black people.
There should be more concern for all groups and less of a belief that some are receiving too little and others too much.
These issues around how darker-skinned people of all races and ethnicities are perceived and treated must be addressed. This is in part because we are racing toward a future in which the share of minorities who are dark-skinned could well be only be a fraction.
By 2065, it is projected that not only will Asian Americans outnumber African Americans, but there will also be nearly twice as many Hispanics in the country as Black people.
So white supremacy could be replaced with a light supremacy, a society in which light-skinned people are still advantaged and dark-skinned people are still oppressed, even as the white majority recedes.
There have been some encouraging partnerships between Black and brown people. Following the murder of George Floyd, another Pew survey found that an even higher percentage of Hispanics than Black people said that they had participated in protests.
In Africa, British-Nigerian actress Beverly Naya produced a documentary on Netflix titled “Skin.”
In many parts of Africa, light skinned women are considered more beautiful and they are likely to succeed in fields like entertainment, marketing and the tourism industry.
Slave masters had a special preference for slaves with lighter skin, who were assigned less difficult indoor tasks as opposed too often horrifying outdoor duties. And now media portrayals of dark skinned people has contributed to colorism.
An African dermatologist says that one way that dark-skinned women dodge discrimination is by using skin bleaching or whitening agents. The global market for skin lighteners will reach $31.2 billion by 2024, with huge markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, according to Global Industry Analysts.
Skin bleaching can have negative health effects since skin-whitening agents have some components that reduce the protective effect of melanin in darker skinned people and may increase the risk of skin cancer.
Let us not forget that these groups have different histories with oppression in this and other countries and different ongoing relationships with it. We must all recognize these differences and confront them in honest and deliberate ways.
Colorism and racism are cousins, and both are bad for a democratic country.
Here at the NABWMT we emphasize the relationships and troubles between Black and white people, but let’s not forget about other communities and their struggles.