Abstract
Dark Girls, a film by D Channsin Berry and Bill Duke, is a powerful exploration of the negative effects on African American girls and women of ‘colourism’; prejudice on the basis of skin shade, often within an ethnic group. It explores how colourism has affected women with dark skin, contextualizing it historically and highlighting the structural racism that serves to maintain it as a vexed issue in the present day.
The film combines moving personal stories with comments from psychologists and other professionals and public figures. In the first part African American women with dark skin describe being called offensive names, including ‘tar baby’, ‘black, ugly nigger’ and ‘gorilla’. The damaging embodied and psychological effects of experiencing themselves as positioned within such discourses were encapsulated by one woman who said she remembers asking her mother to put bleach in her bath water to lighten her skin. Given that girls constitute a minority of the participants in the film, Dark Women would perhaps have been a more appropriate title to avoid the risk of seeming patronizing.
The film rehearses some well-known explanations of colour hierarchies amongst populations with a history of transatlantic enslavement. For example, Tifase Webb-Msemaji, a psychologist, argued that slave masters raped slaves who then had children with lighter skin who occupied superior positions. Sometimes there were 64 distinctions in terms of skin shade and hair gradation and a hierarchy developed according to this. Matthew Shenoda, assistant provost for equity and diversity at California Institute of the Arts, argued that colourism is the product of colonization and cultural invasion where people are taught that the colonizer is superior and then aspire to raise their status by looking more like the colonizer. Daryl Rowe, a psychologist, argued that there is a white supremacist framework where ‘one’s approximation of whiteness is valued around the world’. Greater depth would have been added if there were an explicit discussion of patriarchy and its effect on colourism, which explored the pressure for girls and women with dark skin to try and attain impossible racialized beauty ideals in the heterosexual marketplace.
One of the insidious effects of colourism touched on by the film evokes the classic ‘colour test’ devised by black US psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. In the late 1930s and early 1940s they found that African American children preferred a white doll with blonde hair to a black version of the same doll when asked questions including which is the nice doll, which one looks bad and which they would like to play with. The doll test has been replicated subsequently with similar results (for example, see Kiri Davis’s 2005 short film). Dark Girls shows a black child choosing from cartoon drawings of a girl with different shades of skin ranging from white, through light brown to dark brown. The child selected the white child when asked to pick the smart child and the pretty child, but chose the child with the darkest shade of skin when asked to pick the dumb child and the ugly child. It would have added useful contextualization if the film had cited the Clarks’ doll tests.
Dark Girls draws attention to the pain felt by black women who have experienced the negative effects of colourism and it briefly highlights the potential effect of colourism on the relationship between girls and young women with different shades of skin. One woman with dark skin, for example, explains that she and her friends used to pick fights with girls with light skin. Further comment on the effects of the divisiveness of colourism would have been helpful, particularly as colourism distracts from challenging racism.
In a section called ‘Men: on women’ one man said, ‘I don’t really like dark-skinned women. They look funny beside me’, a dislike reported by a number of men in the film, many of whom had dark skin. It would have been interesting to hear their opinions on their female relatives. Their illuminating insights serve an important role. However, as a woman with dark skin watching the film it was difficult not to feel objectified at times.
In the film one man did say ‘dark skin women are beautiful’ and a few others expressed a preference for women with dark skin, but the film could have explicitly mentioned the strand of black radical discourse that promotes an essentialized ideal of blackness where darker skin is prioritized. Many of the views expressed in the film are essentialist, with either women with light skin being preferred to those with dark skin or vice versa, rather than black women being appreciated irrespective of the shade of their skin. The commentary in the film could have intervened to problematize both standpoints as essentialist and unhelpful. Furthermore, the importance of moving away from essentialist notions of blackness would have been underlined if the film had taken a more intersectional approach to the problem of colourism, exploring how class and sexuality, in addition to gender, ‘are implicated in racialized constructions of what constitutes ‘good-looking’ for black people’ (Young, 2000: 417). In contrast to places where dark skin is devalued, the film also highlights one example of a community where it is celebrated. Tsehaie said there are regions of Ethiopia where ‘chocolate’ is the highest standard of beauty. However, in other regions high status is associated with people with light skin.
Importantly Dark Girls highlights the problem of colourism beyond the United States, exploring how ‘internalized racism’ has resulted in light skin sometimes being idealized in countries including Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and the Gambia where there are billboards promoting skin bleaching cream. A young Korean American woman said when she visited Korea for the first time she realized she stood out because light skin was the beauty ideal and her skin was considered dark. This section would have been even stronger with research or facts and figures to supplement the anecdotal observations.
While not the focus of this film, a future documentary that compares and contrasts the effect of colourism on black boys and men with dark skin would take forward the debate. From a feminist perspective it would also have been valuable to see black women of different shades discussing how they see women with dark skin and more on how women with dark skin see their male counterparts. For a balanced view it would have been good if the film had mentioned that in the United States, as elsewhere, there are also black women with dark skin who do not consider themselves to have been the victims of colourism.
One young black woman said she felt ‘invisible’ to black men at college because she did not have light skin. This was poignant and unsettling. Another woman said that a father told his son not to talk to her as she was a ‘mud duck’ and she thought if she were just a bit lighter her experiences would be different. Lighter skin being seen as more valuable in the relationship market due to dominant racialized notions of female attractiveness was a recurring theme.
Some women with dark skin said that it was white people who made them appreciate their skin when they were growing up, whereas black people made them question it. Although this reproduces narratives of the ‘white saviour’ and makes for uncomfortable viewing, the airing of these experiences will hopefully provoke some soul searching among those black people, and particularly men, with an aversion to women with dark skin.
The film offers much needed comment on structural racism. Cheryl Grills, president of the National Association of Black Psychologists, described this as ‘the kinds of policies and practices that we have in place that perpetuate colourism. Whether that’s the things that you see in the media and advertising … and who gets selected to be the models, and in the movies who plays the lead character and who plays the servant role and who plays the jezebel role. … Society is perpetuating it. Society has a responsibility to do something about it, to self correct.’ There is also further critique of the media, advertising and mainstream representations of beauty in the film. However, these issues are so important that more time could have been devoted to discussing them with an explicit focus on their implications.
The film ends with the message that change needs to start with the individual. For example, Timothy Foley, a psychotherapist, said, ‘It’s important that each of us heal the wounds that we carry so that the music inside of us can be heard by us and by everyone else.’ The message that we are responsible for healing ourselves was also presented by Grills, who said, ‘You are the keeper of the spirit that is you … so if you don’t treat you right … how do we expect anyone else to do the same?’ and Michael Colyar, an actor and comedian, said ‘love begins at home. You gotta love who you are.’ However, the prevalence and power of structural racism makes the idea of self-healing seem simplistic and rather idealistic. It is understandable that the filmmakers wanted to end on a note of hope and some of the women and girls at the end of the film do say that they now appreciate their dark skin, which is encouraging. However, perhaps the ending would have been stronger if it had highlighted organizations, groups and/or individuals who have worked, and are working, to challenge the structural racism that contributes to the continuation of colourism as an insidious problem.