on The Color Spectrum

I’m halfway through Marita Golden’s “Don’t Play in the Sun,” a memoir about her experiences growing up as a darker-skinned black woman and her feelings of inferiority and invisibility within the black community. As Golden puts it, it is “African Americans’ pernicious, persistent dirty little secret­– colorism, color-conscious, color-struck, color complex.” I’ve found the book enlightening, mainly because it’s personalized. It contrasts with another one of my favorite but more academic books, Tatum’s “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race.” Though a memoir by genre, Golden, a professor, sprinkles bits of context-setting historical facts throughout her work, which makes it easier to extend the intimate experiences beyond just her.

If you were to ask me if I was dark- or light-skinned, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I’m not ‘high yella’ nor am I 'blue-black,' as they say. While some use dark to describe me, others say I’m on the lighter side. I don’t think I’ve ever really cared. I lighten up when deprived of sun in the winter and love to lay out in the sun with a good book and 'sunning' during the summer. I’ve never been overly self-conscious about where I fall on the color spectrum, but Golden’s book has me thinking about why I seem to have been spared from this color complex struggle.

If I had to identify what color I was, I would have to base it off of my experiences talking with other people about 'shade' and say that I fall pretty close to right smack dab in the middle. So as I journey through Golden’s book, I ask myself, is it possible that I have not thought about the color complex struggle because I am what colorists would say to be the perfect shade? Not too light, nor too dark, but just black enough.

Growing up I remember liking the light-skinned boy. That was okay. But I also remember liking the dark-skinned boy. One experience stands out to me. As a middle schooler I was sitting with my girlfriends in the cafeteria.

“Look,” one of my friends said, spotting my current girlhood crush.

“Where?” I asked, eager for a look.

“Near the coke machine,” she answered.

“Where?” I asked again, “I don’t see him.”

“That’s because he’s so black he blends in with the side of the coke machine,” someone else

giggled.

I can’t tell you why I remember this moment. I do remember that it took me a few more seconds to spot him, and indeed he was standing right to the side of the coke machine, in a black shirt and black pants. I never considered the teasing that I received for liking a dark-skinned boy to be any different from the teasing that was inevitable when your girlfriends found out who your crush was. But I remember that when they teased me about this crush, it was about skin color.

As someone who rides the middle of the color spectrum, is my lack of experience in never feeling like I was too light or to dark somewhat equivalent to white people living in an American society where ‘whiteness’ is the standard? (I look foolish in ‘nude’ stockings and most ‘skin-colored’ band-aids are definitely not my skin color.) Is white being the perfect shade in race-conscious America similar to my shade of blackness being the perfect shade in race-conscious Black America? And more importantly, was I spared from feelings of inferiority because of this?

I don’t think the answer is a resounding yes, but it is questions like these that have sent me on a welcomed journey of newfound self-awareness regarding my position in society as determined by my skin color. Along this journey, I find myself rethinking the accusation that black people, myself included, have been known to remind white people: “you’ll never understand what it means to always know that you are judged against a norm that looks nothing like yourself.” Because my brown skin with its golden undertones is a standard against which some colorists judge others, it places me in a similar category of being the ‘norm’ within the African American community.

. . . Or at least until I start up my daily visits to the back porch, laid out with a good book, with a newfound gratitude of growing up in a family and a decade that has been more supportive of my love of playing in the sun. . .