Folks have real fantasies about white passing to the point of being convinced, based on no experience of their own, that a bunch of us can pass when we cannot. I really want to talk about why this fantasy exists and how this fantasy operates, but are folks ready for that? https://twitter.com/marcusjdl/status/1194581146262216704

Like I had someone say to me “you could pass for ‘just Jewish’” and first of all Jews come in all colors but second of all YOU CLEARLY HAVE NEVER BEEN MY SHADE IN A SYNAGOGUE. Y’all be inventing shit.

This is such a critical piece of context that has disappeared from public sight. Passing for white is a very distinct psychosocial experience that *white people do not have* and it involves a performance that *white people do not have to do.* https://twitter.com/nevermeantto3/status/1194587925352263685?s=20

The discursive difficulty we face is that colorism is a real, extraordinarily dangerous and damaging phenomenon, and a lot of light skinned people refuse to properly reckon with it. But in the effort to reckon with it, some people have really oversimplified the situation.

Colorism is underpinned by racism, but racism is not solely defined by colorism. A person of color who does not experience colorism still experiences racism. This is both because racism is structural and because the white gaze is gonna white.

I heard Imani Perry say at a public event recently (this is me, roughly paraphrasing) that Black Americans are a multiracial group. We are, by modern definitions of "multiracial"! The majority of us have some European heritage.

Some of us also have a white parent too, but be clear that almost every one of us who has a white parent and is very light skinned looks the way we do because we have a white parent AND because of rape during slavery. We bear that burden, visibly.

We need to talk about colorism and do it far more than we do now. At diversity and inclusion in science events, I'm usually the only one to bring it up. That's ridiculous.

But we need to find ways to talk about it that are grounded in reality rather than erasure and fantasy.

This is completely tangential but if one more light skinned actress gets cast as Storm, I'm going to scream.

A truly bizarre aspect of this is that people who know we cannot pass for white but who also correctly guess that we could lie about being Black somehow believe that "not Black = white." Like my light skinned Black Asian sis who looks Korean. Korean is not white!

Back home in East L.A. people often assume I am Mexican/Chicana. They do not think I am white. Occasionally Puerto Ricans think I am one of the crew. It's not because I seem white to them. The white people calling me an Arab bitch on the street don't think I am white either.

I look like I could be a member of a variety of different people of color groups but because some people don't readily identify me as Black doesn't mean they identify me as white. I cannot believe I need to say this but . . . there is more than one way to be POC in the world. lol

So the question folks should ask themselves is who gains from this conversation where people are pushed out of Blackness and more broadly out of the umbrella of POC? The ability to push people out might feel like real power but it just shrinks our capacity for solidarity.

And as I said a few days ago, that goes both ways. Who gains when folks run around calling themselves half white? Do you think whiteness, as a political identity, works that way? Will you be welcome in the tent of whiteness? Or are you holding it up from the outside?

The fantasy that "light skinned Black person" and "light skinned POC" means "white" has got to go. And so does "unambiguously Black vs. ambiguously ethnic" as a way of describing Black people. The Black Atlantic community comes in a lot of shades. Deal with it.

(This thread is not an invitation to light skinned folks to whine about how you were bullied for being light. No one is being called a bully here. We are talking about a fantasy, why it exists, and why it is a political and historical mistake.)

Last comment: folks act like people just look at skin color to engage in acts of racialization and colorism but they also look at undertone, hair texture, and nose shape and size. They also pay attention to cultural performance cues, which also function as identity markers.

They also look at eye shape.

What I find interesting about nose and eye is that actually but for some melanin, a lot of East Asians and West Africans actually look quite a lot a like. Monolids are not just found in Asia.

I'd like to invite people to learn what folks' political commitments are, rather than just using their physical features as a proxy.

I get in a lot of distinctly Black ass trouble professionally because I do not perform any interest in becoming part of whiteness.

And back to the Marvelverse, my thoughts on why it's important for me as a light skinned person to see dark skinned folks on screen -- the place where we DO fantasize: https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI/status/1012825452199608320

Anyway, people of any shade can sell us the fuck out

cough cough Clarence cough Thomas

I feel like I need to remind everyone that well-lit photos make *everyone* look paler because camera design was calibrated by and for white people