Its why black women are the least likely to get a response on OKCupid. Its why skin-lightening is still a very popular practice worldwide. If young black women internalise racialised beauty standards, it can spawn a debilitating self-hatred. The promotion of this aesthetic is racist and dangerous. And “black features” are beautiful, but not black on people. The boys in the video are reciting from the colonial scripture – beauty is measured in its inches from whiteness. Preferential treatment was given to lighter-skinned women. In the 2011 BBC Three documentary Music, Money and Hip Hop Honeys, presented by Afghani-born journalist Nel Hedayat, video agent extraordinaire Mike Styles claims he could book Hedayat on to an RnB video, telling her : “the good thing about you is your ethnicity – I’m not sure what you are exactly.” In 2016, we reached peak colourism when Kanye West requested “ multiracial women only ” for his Yeezy Season 4 casting. Hip hop videos have cast “racially ambiguous” women with traditionally “black features”: a big bum, big lips, large breasts but a small waist, since the early 2000s. But it’s not a coincidence that each teen description of the ideal woman is a carbon copy of a hip hop video vixen. We can never be certain what we desire and what we’ve been taught to. Beyond being two and a half minutes of adolescent drivel, this video is a microcosm of misogynoir the internalised western beauty ideal distilled and displayed. But I will answer the question here: no – it is not just a preference. His quest to find out whether black British youth are obsessed with “light-skin” girls, or “if it’s just a preference”, isn’t really answered. The answer: light-skins with 3b curly hair and a big back. In an inspired YouTube video that subtly blends general objectification with colourism – our star takes to the streets to ask young black lads what their ideal gal looks like.
So I consigned the memory to my mental deleted folder for things no one needed in 2013 – nestled next to Miley Cyrus’s twerk-inspired rebellion and Iain Duncan Smith.īut then YouTuber VanBanter made this dead video, lest we forget that colourism is still alive and well.
Naturally, it sent me, a medium-to-dark black girl, on a silent self-esteem spiral downward. On a Manchester Magicbus in 2013, an ex-boyfriend told me that mixed-race girls were at the top of his preferred appearance hierarchy. Kimberly Mcintosh: Being spurned by your own race is another burden dark-skinned women don’t need Two of gal-dem’s contributors weigh in on the viral video from VanBanter that has been stirring up controversy around colourism. For centuries light skinned black people have been viewed as more attractive thanks to their proximity to whiteness, and it’s utter bullshit. The black British youth are obsessed with light skin and curly hair, but it’s not just them.