REAL TALK: Telling a dark-skinned person that "Blackness is not a monolith" in conversations about colorism, only perpetuates the problem.

Time and time again, I find the conversations and concerns of dark-skinned Black people to be dismissed and treated as exclusionary towards light-skinned people.

Just like there is no reverse racism, there is no reverse colorism.

We need to stop perpetuating this false equivalency that light skinned people feeling not "Black enough" is the same as dark-skinned people being socially, culturally, and institutionally marginalized by everyone.

While light-skinned people aren't exempt from experiencing racism, they are not completely exempt from the privileges afforded to them by society in not appearing dark-skinned.

This is a fact.

Dark-skinned people are more likely to be imprisoned, suspended, not hired, and not lauded as attractive in mainstream media, and even their own community's spaces.

Let's stop acting like we didn't know this already.

So when dark-skinned people look on television and don't see themselves because the same stories and opportunities being afforded to the same creators centering more racially ambiguous and light skinned Black narratives.

It's the redundancy y'all.

Again, nobody has to tell darker skinned Black people that Blackness isn't a monolith -- we get that.

But within the public narratives that define themselves as for the culture or #blackAF, we, too, deserve to be seen and valued.

Include us, too. We matter, too.