In a recent BBC documentary, entitled Beauty and the Bleach, presenter Tan France (of Queer Eye fame) tackles the issue of colourism. Also known as pigmentocracy, colourism is defined as discrimination that privileges light-skinned people of colour over their darker-skinned peers.
France was born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, to Pakistani immigrant parents. He says he had always assumed that colourism had “something to do with colonialism”. He also illustrates, with harrowing personal stories, how it comes from within one’s own community. “It’s our own people who are saying that we are not worthy,” he says. “We are not worthy unless we are light-skinned.”
As a system, colourism is deeply rooted in the violence of colonial history. The slave-owning colonial societies of the Caribbean and the United States sustained myths of white racial purity. Preferential treatment of lighter-skinned slaves and the “one drop rule” led to lighter skin shades being associated with status and respectability.
