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Do y’all have any idea why darker Black folks started asserting that paler dark folks were “less black” in an antagonistic way? Did they always say this? Or is this a modern phenomenon?
Historically, Multiracial and lighter skinned black folks were always relatively privileged for their proximity to whiteness. In some states like Louisiana and South Carolina, mixed people even owned their own slaves on massive plantations. Some families owned hundreds of slaves
From the time when Paler and multiracial Blacks could draw color lines between themselves and Darker folks they did. Those who had social mobility quickly created institutions and spaces specifically for mixed/pale black folks ONLY
They created clubs, unions, paper bag test parties, even churches that only allowed other pale black folks well into the 1960s! This is history I’m not making this up. Where many of them could scrap up some exclusion to feel powerful, they absolutely did.
While I’m sure Darker folks made a fuss about light skins being antagonistic and exclusionary, they never had the leverage or power to do much about it. They could not claim “we are all black, stop being divisive.” They just had to move along. For centuries.
In areas like Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, etc where there were many Free Biracial Blacks, they created their own communities. They created social conventions that made it taboo for lighter people to socialize with, date, or marry darker negroes. Some resorted to incest...
...before they would think of messing up their good light skinned genes with dark skinned blood.
Later on in American history post-reconstruction, forefathers of colorism: Booker T Washington, WEB Du Bois, and NAACP Pres. Walter White (White passing but biracial) asserted that lighter negroes were more intellectually capable than their darker/poorer counterparts.
I’m the early 1900s, it was commonly believed that Negroes were inferior to Whites in every way. This notion was considered scientifically and Philosophically sound. Anthropologists and Sociologists would hold while conferences about “the state of the Negro”
While, yes, Du Bois was instrumental in fighting these pseudo-scientific theories about Blackness with Logic, he doubled down on many theories that dehumanized Darker and poorer black folks
Du Bois and other colorist Paler Blacks we’re empowered to double down on their colorism by Edward Reuter, who wrote a treatise on “The Mulatto.” He argued that every achievement made by Black folks were thanks to Mulattos. Their White Blood apparently made them superior.
Talented Tenth Negros like Du Bois and Walter White carried on with their discrimination against Black folks for decades. There was not much intellectual pushback until Marcus Garvey came thru
Marcus Garvey was the first highly visible dark skin man to retort the colorism of light skinned Negroes by telling them. “You all are not the true blacks, we darker people are” (Totally paraphrased. If I find the actual quote I will post it)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not positing that Garvey was flawless. I like to call him the first Dr. Umar. He practiced institutional sexism, he might’ve actually been a scammer, and he left his dark skinned Jamaican wife for his biracial secretary lol. He was not flawless.
Garvey was one of the first men to assert that Black was Beautiful though. He was so influential that even the late Rosa Parks was a lifetime follower of him. The points he made were important for the culture, period.
The Black is beautiful movement of the 60s is where you have darker Black folks actually start to antagonize paler Negroes to a far greater extent. Radicalism and denouncement of whiteness was the name of the game. This is when you also have lighter folks marry more dark ppl.
It took a radical push towards upliftment of Blackness for Dark ppl to gain this leverage. It is mainly a defense mechanism against systematic colorism that plagued the black community for centuries! It’s more interesting to unpack this than to cry about not being “blk enuf” IMO
I got most of my info from Stamped from the beginning. It’s a very good introduction to racism and colorism in America. It’s very comprehensive but also pretty long.
