Shedding the shame of blackness: why light skin isn't the peak of perfection

When the producers of a US movie based on the award-winning novel The Hate U Give announced American actress Amandla Stenberg as their choice to play the lead role, there was a riot in the black press in the US and on black Twitter, but also in the broader #BlackLivesMatter movement.

The problem? Many people felt that main protagonist Starr Carter, who was described in the book and illustrated on the cover as darker-skinned, should have been played by a dark-skinned black actress.

The movie, in cinemas recently, is based on Angie Thomas's hugely successful book by the same title, the winner of major awards.

The title was inspired by lyrics from rapper Tupac Shakur, who said that Thug Life, the title of one of his albums, stood for "The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everybody. T-H-U-G-L-I-F-E." Meaning, if society kicks children in the teeth, the children in turn get wild, biting society in the ass.

Now we get to the colour issue. Debra Cartwright, the book's cover art illustrator, said she was surprised by the choice of Stenberg for the role of Starr.

"I was hoping it would be a very brown-skinned actress, because there's so little opportunities in these big movies for darker-skinned actresses," said Cartwright.

The debate on the issue comes a few months after Beyoncé's father, Mathew Knowles, published a book addressing racism and colourism in the US entertainment industry.

In Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, Knowles admitted that when he was a young man, deeply ingrained colourism led him to date only white women, or light-skinned black women who appeared white.

"When I was growing up, my mother used to say, 'Don't ever bring no nappy-head black girl to my house'," Knowles told Ebony magazine.

"In the Deep South in the '50s, '60s and '70s, the shade of your blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message."

When he met Beyoncé's mother, she appeared white to him. He began dating her and eventually they married.

In the interview he further said: "When it comes to black females, who are the people who get their music played on pop radio? Mariah Carey, Rihanna, the female rapper Nicki Minaj, my kids [Beyoncé and Solange], and what do they all have in common?"

Of course we all know the answer: they are all light-skinned.

The more successful black people in the US - be it in entertainment or in politics - have always tended to be light-skinned.

In the raging debate that followed the publication of Knowles's comments, many black Americans offered the opinion that Barack Obama wouldn't have become the first black president were it not for his light complexion.

Colourism is not an exclusively American phenomenon. In black South Africa we make cruel jokes about darker-skinned relatives and friends.

But in the coloured community, colourism is a more serious proposition. Parents actively discourage their children from marrying darker-skinned partners.

A successful coloured guy, even if he is darker-skinned himself, is more likely to seek out a lighter-skinned woman. He has to produce lighter-skinned offspring.

This is understandable: in apartheid SA some darker-skinned coloureds got reclassified as black, losing all the privileges of being coloured. You have to read Joseph Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow: South Africa, black and white, which addresses the race classification issue in some depth.

In the preface to Graham Watson's Passing for White: A study of racial assimilation in a South African school, HJ Simons writes: "The Population Registration Amendment Act of 1967 introduced new tests to be used in race classification. A person must be classified as Coloured if both his parents were so classified, or if one was classified as White and the other as Coloured or African.

"If a person claiming to be White cannot prove that both his parents were so classified, the competent authorities are directed to take into account his habits, education, speech, and deportment; and to establish whether he is generally accepted as White, where he resides, works, and mixes socially with other members of the public."

In other words, ordinary whites still had power to decide if they wanted to privilege, or upgrade, a coloured person into their own privileged ranks, if he behaved the way they expected him to.

Thankfully the laws of racial classification are gone. But the attitudes still prevail, as the issue of The Hate U Give illustrates.

It is no accident that in most of our soapies the successful, influential characters are light-skinned.

TV hosts such as Bonang Matheba and models such as Pearl Thusi are light-skinned.

Given this reality, those who were not born light-skinned but are determined to make it in the entertainment industry work hard at scrubbing the blackness away because it might be an impediment.

Think of people like the veteran kwaito star Mshoza.

She has spoken openly about her skin-lightening regimen, explaining that when she was growing up she was considered ugly because she was darker-skinned. When she began to make money, she set out to correct this "mistake".

While Mshoza has spent a lot of money on modern medication to deal with her pigmentation, in the black community skin-lightening creams with such names as Super-Rose, Ambi and Memafoza have long been cheaper alternatives.

So popular were these skin-lighteners that the manufacturers even came out with versions suited for men's skin: Super-Rose He-Man, Ambi for Men.

All these combined experiences are illustrative of the deeply ingrained belief that in order to be beautiful you had to be lighter-skinned.

There's a popular old seSotho wedding song that says the bride is so beautiful she is like a coloured woman ("ngwana o tswana le leKhaledi"). The original line was "ngwana o tswana le lenaledi". Naledi is "star". But the punters in the community thought naledi was lame and so they replaced it with khaledi.

But colourism in SA is not confined to the black African community. It is alive and well in the Indian community, too. Sorisha Naidoo, former Miss India SA, has spoken openly about this.

When she won the title in 2001 she was a few shades darker than she is now. There were rumbles of anger when she won the title. As time progressed, already ensconced on her throne, she started using skin-lightening creams.

Naidoo said in an interview that being light-skinned is prized in Indian culture, which is bolstered by Bollywood, which in turn becomes the standard bearer of Indian beauty.

Now 40 years old, Naidoo, in an interview with Drum magazine in February this year, said: "I have never shared this, but those comments really hurt me and damaged my self-esteem. I knew I was worthy to be crowned because I'm intelligent. And after so much our country had gone through in terms of racial discrimination, I was shocked people didn't think a dark girl deserved to win."

She wallowed in self-doubt - then decided to bleach her skin.

"The negativity really pulled me down and I fell into the public [opinion] trap. Looking back now, I regret doing it. I think I was more beautiful before. I loved who I was. It was an irrational decision."

Naidoo says there was a time when her skin became too light and she had also developed vitiligo, a condition in which the skin loses its pigment cells, causing discoloured patches. It is the same condition that afflicted Michael Jackson. It took her some time to find medication to reverse the damage, to induce her body to produce more melanin.

The criticism that she faced for being too dark to deserve the Miss India SA title shows us the depth of the roots of mental slavery.

Mainstream society - read, the historically dominant white moneyed class - has ascribed beauty, success and even honesty to the colour white.

The colour black, in dictionaries and phrase books, gets associated with nastiness: being blacklisted, the black sheep in the family, as black as the soul of hell, black as night, etcetera.

As a result of this master narrative, which upholds whiteness as the standard to be aspired to, you will find emotionally weak black people using skin-lighteners as a psychological response to the onslaught that puts down blackness.

Some of them are not necessarily weak; they are being realistic. If you want to make it, modify the tone of your skin.

Of course, many will deny this charge and say: "What I do with my body is my own business!"

But that's what it is: emotional vulnerability stemming from mental slavery.