Why do light skinned blacks think they are better than dark skinned blacks

I have some thoughts about this. I will be sharing none of them

That comment is ridiculous, OP. Perhaps it may have carried weight decades ago and once upon a time, but it is simply inapplicable today. Dark skinned blacks are well represented in every aspect of society. Those who are well beyond such a trifle know the only important color is green.

OP- Several years ago I was reading someone's blog. The topic of discussion was how blacks were considered the least desirable in the gay world ( I think Asians would be on that list). Someone wrote a letter to this gay guys blog and said- I have green eyes and angular features and someone hit me up at Kennedy Airport who was in my league but he wasn't American.

This green eyed black guy DEFINITELY felt superior than more conventional looking/dark skinned blacks - bragging about his angular features and green eyes.

Bored race-baiting troll alert 🚨

I never knew all light-skinned blacks got together and came to an opinion for you to shared with us, OP.

The logistics sounds intriguing.

It's called "colorism", apparently, and I'm staying the fuck out of it

Not all light-skinned people have a superiority complex. Many Black siblings can vary in skin tones and many light-skinned people have dark-skinned parents. The days of light folks marrying other light folks and having their own "mulatto" or "high yellow" communities is long gone.

Another thing is among Black men, it's often dark-skinned men that are seen as "cooler" and more "masculine." Colorism aka the "light is right" mentality is more prevalent among Black women who have internalized so much due to racial self-hatred combined with misogyny. Light skin is seen as more "feminine" or "effeminate." Look at all the Drake and Steph Curry jokes. I feel like light-skinned (not biracial) men are underrepresented now, weird they were huge in the 70s and 80s (The Mack, Smokey Robinson, Jim Kelly, Lionel Richie, DeBarge, Prince, Al B Sure) and seen as the ideal Black male. Some point when Denzel Washington, Bobby Brown, Big Daddy Kane, Michael Jordan and Wesley Snips became sex symbols, it's been dark-skin men are better ever since.

From my experience, Black girls love light-skinned people the most. In fact, most of Beyonce's diehard fans I know are dark-skinned Black girls who want to look like her. Light-skinned or mixed dudes like Drake, Chris Brown and TI are defended so hard by dark-skinned Black women despite all of these men being colorist. Some light-skinned Black women love to show off and brag as well. Terms like Creole, Mulatto, yellowbone, etc which would be racist, degrading and fetishizing are now reclaimed on social media. Colorism is so much worse for Black women and many internalize it and put light skin on a pedestal. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye hits the nail on the hammer and I liked how it also addressed the biggest perpetuators of colorism are Black mothers who teach it to their children and favor the lighter-skinned kids while treating the darker skin child like shit.

Source: I'm a light-skinned Black man.

R7- Have you seen DARK GIRLS on the Oprah Winfrey Network- it's good.

FYI - The term is called "High Yellow" among our darker-skinned brothers. I'm not a racist, nor am I making this up. I worked for many years in a kitchen with a diverse group of people, and this term/epithet came up frequently.

Check out the Alpha Kappa Alpha versus the Delta Sigma Theta sororities. I have many friends in both.

In prehistoric times when SNL would take chances and be funny they addressed this issue with Garrett Morris and UN Ambassador Julian Bond

SNL : Julian Bond: 04/09/77: "Black Perspective". A little over 7 minutes into the program

Garrett was superb in this

I don't know any light-skinned Black who think they are superior to dark-skinned ones. I feel they would have to be extremely old or one of those blue-blood type of families that purposely inbred like Beyonce's mother's family. The most colorist things I hear are from dark-skinned Blacks who envy light skin and disparage dark skin. Some light-skinned people are colorists but I think many actually feel "less Black" nowadays thanks to the rise a globalization of Africanness. Many Africans will straight up tell a light-skinned Black American they are not truly Black. Many Latinos also in come to say the same thing. Which is insulting to our legacy as many Civil Rights Leaders were light-skinned and Black American is an ethnic group not just a race. Light-skinned Black people have two Black parents or one Black and one biracial parent. So they are culturally just Black and raised in a mostly Black environment.

I don't think white people even treat light-skinned Blacks all that well, maybe give them more benefit of the doubt and more access to move up a station. But when it all goes to shit, white people will throw that light-skinned person (including Asian, Indian, Hispanic) under the bus faster than a white person. Obama was biracial and light-skinned but still got a lot of unfair attacks that had little to do with his actual performance.

Personally, I don't consider modern biracial (born after the 80s) to be Black the same way as light-skinned Black or old school biracials. I think the fact is many biracial people now have both parents raising them. In the past a of lot of biracial children were the product of white men and Black women (consensual or not) with the Black mothers raising the child after the white father abandoned them. Those biracial kids were raised to be just Black (often not aware of their white fathers) and married darker-skinned Black people. People like Halle Berry, Barack Obama, Faith Evans and Mariah Carey grew up in a time when biracial as a strong identity just did not exist in America and they would be ridiculed for insisting on being "Mixed not Black" by both white and Black people. But today, the people like Halsey, Drake, Zendaya, Zoe Kravitz, Logic and Tinashe very much have a choice in how they can identify and many were raised in white environments and mainly relate to other white people. Jesse Williams and Alicia Keys are interesting because they grew up in a mostly urban Black environment and that had a big impact on their self-perception which is why they overcompensate. Some biracial people from suburban and affluent neighborhoods tend to have a victim mentality and superiority complex which Black people find annoying. Biracial people are not an oddity or social rejects anymore, I know many that have mostly white friends and partners.

Quo Vide:

In many households, treatment of slaves varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields, while lighter-skinned house servants had comparatively better clothing, food and housing.[11] Referred to as "house negroes", they had a higher status and standard of living than a field slave or "field negro" who worked outdoors.

As in President Thomas Jefferson's household, the presence of lighter-skinned slaves as household servants was not merely an issue of skin color. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their children or other relatives. Several of Jefferson's household slaves were possibly children of his father-in-law John Wayles and the enslaved woman Betty Hemings, who were inherited by Jefferson's wife upon her father's death. In turn Jefferson himself had sexual relations with Betty and John Wayles's daughter Sally Hemings, the half-sister to Thomas Jefferson's wife. The Hemings children grew up to be closely involved in Jefferson's household staff activities. Two sons trained as carpenters. Three of his four surviving mixed-race children with Sally Hemings passed into white society as adults.[12]

The term "house negro" appears in print by 1711. On May 21 of that year, The Boston News-Letter ran an advertisement that "A Young House-Negro Wench of 19 Years of Age that speaks English to be Sold."[13] In a 1771 letter, a Maryland slave-owner compared the lives of his slaves to those of "house negroes" and "plantation negroes", refuting an accusation that his slaves were poorly fed by saying they were fed as well as "plantation negroes", though not as well as the "house negroes".[13][14] In 1807, a report of the African Institution of London described an incident in which an old woman was required to work in the field after she refused to throw salt-water and gunpowder on the wounds of other slaves who had been whipped. According to the report, she had previously enjoyed a favored status as a "house negro".[15]

Margaret Mitchell made use of the term to describe a slave named Pork in her famed 1936 Southern plantation fiction, Gone With the Wind.[16]

African-American activist Malcolm X commented on the cultural connotations and consequences of the term in his 1963 speech "Message to the Grass Roots", wherein he explained that during slavery there were two types of slaves: "house negroes" who worked in the master's house, and "field negroes" who performed outdoor manual labor. He characterized the house negro as having a better life than the field negro, and thus being unwilling to leave the plantation and potentially more likely to support existing power structures that favored whites over blacks. Malcolm X identified with the field negro.[17]

OP's post sounds like a SNL sketch from the 70s.

Every group has colorism, look at Asia. That’s where most skin bleaching products come from.

The funny thing is white isn’t considered desirable among white people. Being pasty or blue or pink isn’t attractive, looking vampire / never seen sunlight. White people like to be more golden or tan than pale. But places like South Korea looking like a porcelain toilet bowl is chic.

And to add to my R14…

I’m biracial. I’m the same complexion as my mother, who’s Irish. But we’re more gold undertone.

But being a photographer, I’ve learned how self conscious white people are about being too pale. A lot of white people have issues with being pasty and looking like ghosts in photos and I feel like it’s never discussed openly, always in some form of passing.

And the other thing is image in western culture has changed.

100 years ago to be light and fair represented wealth and social status. Staying out of the sun was a sign of not being a peasant and having to work outside.

But today being pale is the opposite. Being tan can be a representation of wealth because spending time outside and being brown means you travel or go to the beach and have time to relax. Being pasty in July means you work a lot and have no social life.

Crabs in a bucket.

Look it up..

R15 you are right. I am as white as a sheet, with light blue eyes and blond hair — and obviously, I can't stand the sun because I burn so quickly. As a child I had a lot of children bullying me, comparing me to a cartoon ghost figure, asking me if I was a vampire, etc.

Now in my 30s I pay it no mind, but I do look so very very pale in group pictures… :-/

Considering that this is the site where many a white gay declares that biracial people are the best looking anywhere, I am astounded that a white gay ( it types white) can come on here as if colorism has absolutely NOTHING to do with white supremacy and furthermore, thinks that colorism only affects Black/Black descended people, as if it didn't start within the white race. There are examples of white colorism on this site in abundance, going so far as to declare Continental Italians superior to their American counterparts and manifesting colorist demarcations between southern/ Sicilian Italians and Germanic/ Tyrolean Italians. All that is honored about Southern Italians is their cocks , what with the amount of Northern European descendant rape fantasists that desecrate this site.

If this site is a true example of the median intelligence of white gays, no wonder you lot just stand around whilst your own are erasing you in order to give mental succour to fetishists who think that they are opposite to . Worse is that you cringe in the face of accusations that it is white gays, not white/Black straights that have made the lives of do nothing gays of color bad. I say that as a black person. Your apathy , racism and cowardice deserves to be taken advantage of. It would be rude not to in this dog eat dog world. I have yet to see evidence of any millennial/younger gay that could walk in the shoes of any public gay person who came before them. Threads like these enable me to double down on that. Coward duncebats.

OP = Joy Reid

Where are you from and what do you look like, R19?

A light skinned black could have very well inherited a 100 percent white brain not just lighter skin. We all know that white brains are clever but also racist.

R22- I've concluded you did NOT inherit a clever brain.

Check this out

Light skinned blacks seem to be pretty normal and less likely to be violent.

Maybe read the bible. Light skinned slaves are allowed in house.