This week continues the discussion on how we go about unlearning skin color bias. Get caught up on part 1 here. While last week we tackled the overarching strategy, this week we get to explore the novelty of various activities that can help us execute or implement the overall strategies I shared last time.
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Responding to Colorist Content or Incidents
One ongoing practice that will help you unlearn skin color bias is to 1) practice noticing colorism, and 2) critique it when you notice it.
Noticing colorist content or colorist incidents can keep the message or narrative from slipping through your conscious awareness into your subconscious program. Starting to become more conscious about colorism is a form of boundary against internalizing it. Think of your unconscious or subconscious as private property that you want to guard from trespassing. Your conscious awareness is like the alarm system or the security system that help deter trespassers.
The critique helps you shape the narrative. You can now take a conscious approach to direct the meaning of what you see happening. I’ll use “The Slap” as an example here. Without conscious critique through the lens of colorism, we risk internalizing and normalizing light skinned people perpetuating physical violence against dark skinned people.
The critique can involve explaining or analyzing how it’s colorism, why it’s problematic, what could be done differently, and/or helpful ways to course correct or proceed going forward.
Curating & Consuming Media and Entertainment
TV & Movies: I’ll start here because I think it’s the most obvious place to start. To put it plain and simple: Watch more movies and TV with positive, dynamic representations of dark skinned people, especially dark skinned women, especially dark skinned women with different body types and hair styles. I highly recommend Abbot Elementary.
For more on my take about not just quantity but also quality of representation, check out my post on colorism in Hollywood.
Social Media: I am a fan of social media because we have even more agency here than we do with more traditional forms of media. Curate a new feed. You can edit your current feeds or start new profiles from scratch. If you want to keep your existing pages, start unfollowing accounts that don’t help fill your feed with dark skin affirmation and start following more accounts that do.
Follow hashtags like #darkskinlove or any number of the many that are out there. Hashtags will vary between platforms.
And actually engage with the content you want to see more often. You can train the algorithm to give you more of what you do want and less of what you don’t want. But you have to teach it what you actually like by engaging more intentionally and more frequently.
Music: You get the trend by now that this always involve a balance of subtracting and adding. Let go of the music and music videos that even remotely colorist. Fill your playlists with music and music videos created by dark-skinned people, that speak truth to you, that affirm dark skin, etc. If we’re just keeping it real, we can’t really depend on dark-skinned male artists to make the music or the videos that do this.
Print Media: This of course includes things like books and magazines. Whether it’s novels, collections of essays, academic books specifically about colorism, magazines like CRWNMAG, coffee table photography books etc. you can read these, study these, enjoy these, collect this, or display these in your home, office, classroom, etc.
Other Visual & Performing Art: Wall art is a fun and effective way to curate your physical space with affirming imagery of. Paintings, prints, posters, photographs, and any other visual art can be displayed around you.
You can also attend live shows, art galleries, Black dance performances, and so much more. This brings me to the last section on activities.
Proactive Activities
The possibilities are endless. So part of what I want to do is crowd source ideas from my community of folks that I’ll share on the Monday live stream (Instagram @ 7:00pm ET) and that you can watch in the YouTube video embedded above.
However, here’s a quick list of some activities I can recommend now and that I’ve tried before:
- Make collages with photos, images, words, etc
- Paint, draw or make other forms of art
- Take photographs or do a photo shoot
- Coloring books
- Write affirmations
- Spend time around diverse dark-skinned people
- Spend quality with dark skinned people
- Do photo studies of yourself and others
Accountability
Start doing one or more of these things, and tell me about it! Send me an email or leave a comment on social media.