11 Moments From "Light Girls" That Had Us Talking

I’m not going to lie. For a time there, I was trying to avoid watching Bill Dukes’ Light Girls like the plague. After its predecessor, Dark Girls, came out, I wondered if it was really a good idea to try and compare the experiences of black women of a darker complexion to those of lighter-skinned black women. What would that help? But after running into the documentary on accident while flipping through my favorite channels last night, I can say that there isn’t any kind of comparing and contrasting going on. It’s just women sharing their personal struggles about not feeling black enough, and internal and external battles over their looks. They just wanted their stories to be heard, and after two hours of listening to all of them, I can admit that they were all very interesting and compelling–so much so, that I took notes. Here are 10 things that stood out and really got me thinking after watching Light Girls.

Women Overcompensating For Not Feeling Black Enough

Kym Whitley shared a story about the way that she used to treat her mother, who was very light, because of her own insecurities with her skin. She now says that she realizes that she was overcompensating at times and ganging up on her mom because she didn’t feel like she was black enough:

“My father was very, very, very dark and my mother was very, very, very light. I thought she was a white woman. So that’s a problem right there. My momma was light and I did tease her about it. I was like, ‘You’re white, and I’m going to get some DNA on you cause you’re lying. But now that we’re talking about it, maybe that’s the thing: I’m trying to be too black sometimes. I’ve done the reverse thing. Because of my mother being so fair and people thinking she was white, because of being teased, people come in my house and they say, why you got so much black art? Why you got so much Africa around you? I never thought about it, but I think I was trying to make up for not being black enough, you know?”

How Biracial Women Deal With Detractors

One woman’s tearful story about black people actually telling her that she’s not a “real black person” because she is half white was pretty gripping:

“I was just told recently that I’m not a real black person, I’m not even a part black person. It doesn’t matter what my granddaddy did or what he was about. I don’t know anything about the black experience and I have no right because my skin color doesn’t match…it cheated me out of being who I am. And I’m now almost 40 figuring that out.”

On Albinism

Light Girls showed us a variety of perspectives, including one of a woman dealing with albinism. Though she wasn’t named, this mother’s experiences as a young girl forever framed the way she saw herself, specifically in relation to her family, and her son:

“I’m the only one who looks this way. Growing up I was called names like Casper, white bread…I was always told that I was ugly. Even my brother, growing up, he was embarrassed. I overheard him telling some of his friends that I wasn’t really his biological sister, that I was adopted. Our race can be very cruel…Some people don’t want to touch my hand. Some people don’t want to talk to me. Some people have even said, ‘What’s this white girl doing here?’

“I never wanted my son to be embarrassed by me. I wouldn’t go to school right away. I would make his father go because I just didn’t want children to tease him because I was his mother.”

Hair And Compliments Being Turned Into Negative Things

A common thread in some of the interviews I witnessed were women saying that as young girls, other girls tried to attack the things they didn’t like about these women. Hair was even being threatened to be cut off. As actress Rolanda Watts put it:

“They threatened me every day that they were going to cut my hair. I actually had white kids on the school bus who were hiding me in the back of the bus when the black kids wanted to cut my hair.”

Ear lobes were ripped by tugging at earrings. Fights were started over people thinking they’re “all that.” And as  Dr. Steve Perry pointed out, compliments were turned on their head: “You think you’re so pretty”; “You think you’re so smart”; “You think you’re so cute.”

Do Lighter Women Deal With More Sexual Abuse?

I’m not sure how something like this can be measured, but multiple women in the documentary who were sexually abused said that as the lighter sibling, they were often the ones picked out and molested out of all the children in their home. TV personality Onyxx Monopoly said, “A lot of light skinned girls raised in families, especially if it’s an African American family, the lighter girl gets most of the sexual abuse. In my sleep I was being touched on. In the streets I was being touched on, and it made me feel like a blow-up doll.”

Another woman, activist and actress Brook Bello, took things a step further and said that after running away because of molestation in her home, she was taken in by a couple who eventually beat her and got her involved in sex trafficking:

“In the arena of human trafficking…there is definitely a choice between dark skin and light skin. For me, that was the first time I realized that it’s not really great to be this if the stigma is that I’m going to make this guy I don’t even know this money. I lost my virginity that way.”

Prejudice From Your Own Family

“My grandparents didn’t go to my parent’s wedding because my mom is black.” – Angela Yee

I think we can all agree that our own family members can be the main ones who make us feel bad about different things in our lives: weight, our relationship status, job situations, etc. This is also true when it comes to skin tone, and who we have children with. Power 105.1 radio personality Angela Yee said that her Asian grandparents have a prejudice toward her, her mother, and her black friends. When her friends would come by her house to visit, her grandparents would say things like, “You better make sure you hide your car keys.”

And don’t even get me started on Cori Murray’s (Entertainment Director at Essence) story about a family member’s disrespectful comments about her infant daughter:

“Someone in my family very close to me, she was like, ‘I hope she doesn’t get any darker than this.’ I have to be very mindful of that and I try not to have my daughter around her too much, especially alone, just for that slip up. I know it could just take that one time, saying something negative, and it could impact her forever.”

Global Colorism

I also enjoyed the perspective given about how women of other cultures are made to believe that being light is right. From Tatyana Ali sharing the Caribbean perspective (“We do colorism so well.”) to Indians believing that lighter skin equates to a higher class and literal caste, and Japanese women using powders and lighteners to look like the beauty standard in America. Colorism is ugly, and it’s everywhere.

Bleaching And Tanning

We all know about about women all over turning to bleaching creams (and as the documentary shared, women having stillbirths because they won’t stop using them), but who knew about black women tanning to get darker? Raven-Symone admitted that back when she was on “That’s So Raven,” she was tanning three or four times a week. When one of the production staff members told her that she needed to stop because she was messing up the lighting, she stopped: “Sorry just trying to be pretty.”

And another woman tanned so much that she ended up with discoloration all over her face, which she needs therapy to improve.

How Men See Light-Skinned Women

“I think a preference is okay, but why do you have it?”

When men were interviewed, they were basically asked about their preferences, and why some men go out of their way to date lighter black women, and even white women at times. But I was intrigued by the varying opinions:

One minute it was this…

“I prefer dark-skinned women. The dark-skinned women I have dated have been more supportive. They’ll stay there. The light-skinned chicks, if I got a 214 BMW, she’s looking for a cat with a 216.”

The next minute it was this…

“Light skin is more of a trophy, and as a man, you want to have a trophy girl…it’s more of a prize.”

Light-Skinned Women And Their Dating Experiences

“It’s painful to find that some men want to date my complexion and not me.”

From being called a “pale b***h” (and having a bottle thrown at them) on the street because a man thought they were being dissed by a light skinned black woman, to feeling that unfair expectations are put on them because of their skin tone, the dating experiences of the women interviewed were very interesting:

“I do have a lot of, specifically white men will approach me and think that I’m a lot easier to deal with because of the way that I look. But when they hear me talk they’re like, ‘Oh hell, let me get away from this one. This one looks like Marilyn McCoo on the outside, but she’s Florida Evans on the inside.” – Aida Rodriguez

What Can Be Done About Colorism?

Based on the thoughts of a lot of the experts interviewed for the documentary, as Michaela Angela Davis put it, we are the generation who needs to learn how to pursue happiness. The best way to do that without being burdened by colorism is to deconstruct this problem and save ourselves. At the end of the day, we can’t continue to blame the media and others for the way we talk to and treat others when it comes to our skin. It’s time for us to stand up and do better. As Iyanla Vanzant said in the documentary, for women holding grudges against one another over skin, “Her experience may have been different, but at the end of the day, we’re all black.”