We all have those iconic role models whose words, art, and revolutionary lives shape who we are and what we do today. Below is a (slightly chronological) list of 8 historic figures who deeply influenced my colorism healing journey during my adolescence and as I was coming into young adulthood.
(Watch the video version of this blog post.)
1- Marcus Garvey
I discovered Marcus Mosiah Garvey around 2000 or 2001 while scouring blogs to find support while transitioning from relaxed hair to natural hair as a sophomore in high school. Blogs like Curly Nikki were coming into prominence at the time and there were a couple of pages and forums for black women in their natural hair transition.
On one such page I discovered a quote by Garvey:
“Don’t straighten the kinks in your mane. Straighten the kinks in your brain.“
Marcus Garvey
I learned that Garvey also launched a Black is Beautiful campaign long before the Civil Rights movement made the phrase “Black is Beautiful” a popular statement.
This was all food for my adolescent black girl soul.
2- Malcolm X
Like many people, I’d known Malcolm from the Spike Lee movie, and his autobiography, but it wasn’t, again, until my natural hair journey and searching online for information that I discovered his 1965 speech: “Not Just an American Problem, but a World Problem.”
He really broke down colorism in a way I always felt but never articulated or saw or heard articulated and broadcast so clearly and so boldly. He clearly explained the correlation between the white-controlled media’s negative images of Africa and of Black people and how that influenced black people to despise Africanness and Blackness.
“It’s imagery. They use their ability to create images, and then they use these images that they’ve created to mislead the people. . . . Our color became a chain, a psychological chain. Our blood — African blood — became a psychological chain, a prison, because we were ashamed of it. We felt trapped because our skin was black. We felt trapped because we had African blood in our veins.”
Malcolm X
You can read more excerpts from X’s speech in my post on Colorism Quotes.
3- Alice Walker
I learned about Alice Walker’s treatment of colorism via her short story “Everyday Use,” which I read my freshman year of high school (I think) and it recently inspired an article I published in English Journal titled “Everyday Colorism.” The story is about two sisters, one lighter and one darker, and the differential outcomes and differential treatment and overall tension between them.
As an adult I read In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (a tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, whom I’ve included later in this list). In this book, Walker actually coins the term colorism and she really breaks down the issue, especially among African American women, in the chapter “If the present looks like the past, What does the future look like.” Walker argued that colorism is just as significant as sexism and racism and colonialism.
You can read more excerpts from Walker’s book in my post on Colorism Quotes.
4- Zora Neale Hurston
In my junior year of high school, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston calls out the hypocrisy of colorism among African Americans:
At that time in my life I felt the pain of colorism very deeply. But I also felt the enforced silence about colorism within my community just as much. It was way more taboo to discuss it back then. I felt so validate reading Hurston’s words. I re-read them over and over again. It was cathartic to hear someone (of such historical prominence at that!) speak so directly and bluntly about colorism and corroborate my own observations and experiences.
5- Toni Morrison
Early in college, a friend of mine let me borrow The Bluest Eye (1970). I instantly recognized the internalized white supremacy that the main character suffered from. Seeing how deep her suffering went gave me perspective: As much as colorism and racism hurt me, I would be okay.
Years later I read Morrison’s follow up on the topic, God Help the Child (2015). In an interview, Morrison said she revisited the topic because the first novel was so tragic. Without spoiling the story for those who haven’t read it, the more recent novel does offer us something that the first did not–hope for redemption, healing, forgiveness (including self), and reconciliation.
6- Wallace Thurman
Before discovering Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry at a used bookstore (I think) early on in college, I had never read anything that was so explicitly about colorism. The book depicts colorism in every way and on every page: everything ranging from differences in hair texture, gender, dating and sex, employment, education, social groups, and class.
Thurman was a Harlem Renaissance writer, and the story mostly takes place in his contemporary setting of 1920’s Harlem. The main character is a dark-skinned, young black woman who is both a victim of colorism and a perpetrator of colorism.
Thurman’s novel remains one of the most thorough and complex studies of colorism I have encountered to date.
7- Nina Simone
As with many of the people on this list, I discovered the High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone, while I was in undergrad. She herself was a dark-skinned black woman with wooly hair, which automatically drew me to her. I had previously only known the Billy Holiday’s and Lena Horne’s, whom I did not identify with as deeply. And I suspected that their relative fame was itself an outcome of colorism.
The first song I heard was “Little Girl Blue,” and it was love at first listen. But then I listened to “Four Women,” and Simone then became and remains one of the most iconic historic figures in my personal life. The song itself is about four black women with different skin tones and the struggles they face in a racist and sexist country. The first woman has black skin and wooly hair, and her name is Sarah!
Never before had I felt so thoroughly represented in music.
8- Gwendolyn Brooks
Now that I’m living in Illinois, I get to see more of Brooks’s legacy, since she was a Chicago girl. She’s another dark-skinned writer, like myself. One of my favorite books of all time is her autobiographical novella Maud Martha. The prose is so poetic.
Brooks talks explicitly about the character’s experiences with colorism starting in childhood with being ignored by her family in favor of their favorite–her older and lighter sister Helen. Maud Martha is bullied and ignored as a kid, and as an adult, her classist husband prefers and entertains pale-skinned, “white-looking” women.
But I see myself in Maud Martha because she has a rich inner life. She’s deeply introspective, self-reflective, and has a vibrant interiority. Despite her external observations of the world, she reserves a special perspective of her place in the world that is only hers. She asserts herself in the world in ways that reflect her firm self-assuredness.
My list is not meant to be representative of everyone who has said anything worthwhile about colorism. So if there are other individuals who’ve greatly inspired you in your personal path toward colorism healing, let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from ya!
Sincerely,
Sarah