Colorism

Skin color is a topic that every child growing up in the AMEMSA community has had to ponder at some point. Either we realized we were darker than other kids and didn’t share the same features as our peers. Or, we were called “white” by our classmates and had our ethnicity invalidated.

Many dealt with discrimination within their own households as older family members with traditional mindsets preached the supremacy of lighter skin. In an article by Jummanah Abu Samra, she recounts a conversation with a friend in which she’s romanticizing European features extensively. European skin tone is set as the goal to achieve, prompting unequal treatment on the basis of skin color and the rise of practices such as skin-whitening. This sort of interracial discrimination is called Colorism.

In the Oxford dictionary, Colorism is prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group. Colorism affects AMEMSA people within households, in media, and in the Eurocentric beauty standards that pervade our society.

This harmful mindset has been heavily supported by the media as it continues to favor those who have lighter skin and ‘European’ features. Conversely, a scholarly article by Taunya Lovell Banks mentions the crowing of Nina Davuluri as the first South-Asian American Miss America. Banks explains Nina Davuluri, a woman with darker skin and features, was selected because “dominant American culture” favored “darker more ‘exotic’ South Asians.” On the other hand, in film and television, AMEMSA actors are lighter skinned if they are portrayed in a positive light, and darker skinned if portrayed in a negative light.