Being Black in America has always been layered. It is pride and pain, confidence and confusion, beauty and battle all at once. Within that experience sits something that still cuts deep even in 2025: colorism. Most people think of it as an issue that only affects darker-skinned Black people. But colorism is not one-sided. It is a full spectrum of judgment, bias, and insecurity. It shows up in different ways, but it wounds us all.
I have lived on a side of colorism that is often overlooked. It is the side where people claim you are not Black enough. Growing up, I was called “light bright,” “yellow,” and even “low white.” Those words stuck. They made me feel like I had to constantly prove my Blackness to my own people. It is a strange place to live in, to be proud of your Black identity but questioned by your own community for it. Over time, I realized this is just another form of the same disease. Colorism divides us from the inside.
When we talk about colorism, we are really talking about psychological conditioning that started long before any of us were born. It is not just about shade or tone; it is about the ways racism trained us to see hierarchy where there should be harmony. Somewhere along the line, we inherited false ideas about what looks more valuable, more worthy, more beautiful. Those ideas were never ours, but they still follow us. We end up repeating patterns that were meant to keep us separated from one another.
That is why the conversations around colorism often feel one-sided and repetitive. We talk about pain, but not healing. We compare who has been hurt worse, instead of asking how we can stop hurting each other. I have seen how darker-skinned people can feel resentment from years of exclusion. I have also seen lighter-skinned people internalize guilt for privileges they never wanted. Neither side benefits from staying in those emotional trenches. We are still playing a game that was never designed for any of us to win.
By now, we should know better. We have access to everything. We have history, education, technology, and platforms that our ancestors could never imagine. We can create our own media, our own businesses, and our own definitions of beauty. Yet colorism still appears in our comments, our dating choices, our casting decisions, and even in our casual jokes. It is a quiet poison that we sip without realizing it. We often do not see how we have been trained to view one shade of Black as softer, smarter, or more desirable than another.
I have come to believe that colorism will not be healed through debate or comparison. It will only be healed through unity and accountability. That means being honest about how we have contributed to it. It means checking ourselves when we make jokes about someone’s skin tone. It means refusing to let the media tell us what Black beauty looks like. It also means creating opportunities that reflect all sides of who we are, on screens, in boardrooms, in art, in schools, and beyond.
Colorism does not have to be the story we pass down. We can stop romanticizing struggle and start normalizing healing. Every generation deserves a little less of this weight. We need to stop arguing about who had it worse. Instead, we can focus on how to build something better together.
I still think about those moments when people questioned my Blackness. At one point, I used to defend myself with anger. Now I see it differently. The problem was never me. The problem was the belief that skin tone could define our culture or the essence of our Blackness. That mindset was planted to divide us, but we do not have to keep watering it.
Blackness is not a shade. It is a shared experience, a rhythm, a language, a fight, and a beauty that exists in every tone. If we really want to fight colorism, we have to love ourselves and each other enough to stop letting it use us against one another.
We have already broken too many barriers to let something as shallow as shade keep us apart. Unity is the cure. The more we build together, the less space colorism will have to exist. It is not about being too Black or not Black enough anymore. It is about being whole.
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