Biological Pigment Bias Perspective

Colourism

Prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a darker skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

Some people are aware of the hierarchies created by white chattel slave owners in America and the Caribbean (Gaspar, 1996). Black women were raped, brutalised and discarded by white chattel slave owners. Children of mixed heritage born from these rapes were then taken from their mothers and deemed “good enough “to work as subservient domestic slaves in the white chattel slave owners house.

Thus, created a distinction between the “House nigger” who was often lighter in skin colour and the “field nigger” (JAY-Z, 2016), who was often darker in colour. Chattel owners often used these divisions to create discord among the slaves as the light skinned “house niggers” were afforded certain “luxuries” (Harris, 2008). They were given cast off clothes belonging to the white mistresses, access to food waste and deemed important enough to be able to serve at white chattel owners functions.

This produced a hierarchy of importance which was quickly assimilated to represent skin colour and create divisions amongst slaves who outnumbered their white chattel owners and who could very easily if united, overthrow the ruling white classes.

I use the word “chattel” (Gabriel, 2007) in this context because of its proximity to the world ‘cattle’. Historically, there has been some confusion about slavery and I would even go as far as to say a romanticism about being kept ‘against one’s will’ which has been played out in numerous depictions of slavery in film and television. Often there is a strange almost fetishtisation and sexualisation that takes place regarding the black male and female body that seeks to subconsciously or unconsciously soften the blow or justify the mass rape, systematic torture and dehumanisation Of Africans. We must remember that slaves were considered subhuman (Thomas, 1998), property, treated no better than the cows we keep today that are kept in lactation so that they continuously produce milk.

The European slave trade (Thomas, 1998) was a gargantuan holocaust that even now, has left displaced black people with a multitude of problems which are still being dealt with today. One of these issues is the legacy of colourism which was initially formulated to create division amongst the African diaspora and still wreaks havoc amongst our community (Harris, 2008). Through internalised racism born out of the continued oppression of marginalised groups. We must deal with a world which continuously perpetuates the myth that whiteness epitomises the beauty ideal. The problem is further exacerbated by the continued efforts to denigrate and undermine PoC to the fringes and margins of society by continuously showing underachievement and lack of progression by the African diaspora, socially and academically.

Added to this, children as young as 5 years old (Black doll White doll, 2016) have been shown to be psychologically damaged when discussing issues relating to their colour or dark skins it could be suggested that this is due in part to negative portrayals of black bodies. See Black doll white doll. (2007) video on YouTube.

Despite there toxic ingredients, Skin lightening products are used by many within the African diaspora who are willing to risk ill-health to appear lighter and thus, access certain privileges that they perceive are available to lighter skinned people.

I have talked a lot about European chattel enslavement but what is not as well-known is the Arab enslavement of Africans.

The selling of black slaves by black slaves is often used as a counter argument to diminish the responsibility of European Chattel slave owners.

In her book ‘Layers of Blackness’, Dr Deborah Gabriel discusses racist attitudes in religious texts as well as the chattel enslavement of Africans by the mixed offspring of raped African women by Arab men.

In the book the author talks about the hierarchy of colourism that then ensued because the children of those abused women took on the identities of their fathers who had higher social status as a matter of survival.

“The inter-mixing of Muslim traders with indigenous Africans produced a lighter-skinned group that formed both the elite of African society as well as the slave trading class” (Gabriel, 2007).

References

Clark, K & Clark, M. (1940). Black Doll White Doll.(2007). [online video] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybDa0gSuAcg [Accessed 30 July 2018]

Gabriel, D. (2007). Layers of blackness. London: Imani Media Ltd.

Gaspar, B.D & Hine, C.D (1996). More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Thomas, H. (1998) The Slave Trade: History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. London: Macmillan.

Z, J. (2016). The Story of O.J.[Digital Download] Roc Nation; Universal