Colorism: The Hierarchy Inside the House That Nobody Wants to Dismantle

We are a people who have spent four centuries fighting a hierarchy imposed from outside — the brutal, exhaustively documented hierarchy of white supremacy that classified us as property, then as three-fifths of a person, then as separate-but-equal, then as targets for mass incarceration — and yet within the walls of our own community, within our own families and friendships and romantic choices and hiring decisions and magazine covers and music videos, we have maintained, with remarkable fidelity, a replica of the very hierarchy we claim to oppose. It is organized by shade. The lighter you are, the higher you sit. The darker you are, the less you are worth. And the silence that surrounds this arrangement — a silence enforced not by white supremacists but by Black people who benefit from it, who have internalized it so completely that they no longer recognize it as a wound — is among the most damaging silences in the entire conversation about race in America.

This is not an accusation from outside. It is a reckoning from within. And it is long overdue.

The Architecture of the Hierarchy

The origins are documented and they are slavery’s. The plantation system created a two-tier social structure among enslaved people that mapped directly onto skin color. Lighter-skinned enslaved people — frequently the children of rape by slaveholders — were disproportionately assigned to domestic work: cooking, cleaning, caring for the slaveholder’s children. Darker-skinned enslaved people were disproportionately assigned to field labor — the more physically punishing, more dangerous, more exposed work. The lighter-skinned domestic workers had greater proximity to the slaveholder’s culture, greater access to education (such as it was), and greater likelihood of manumission. A hierarchy that began as the slaveholder’s organizational convenience became, over generations, a social reality with its own internal logic and its own mechanisms of enforcement.

After emancipation, the hierarchy did not dissolve. It calcified. The “paper bag test” — a practice in which a brown paper bag was held against a person’s skin, and only those lighter than the bag were admitted to certain churches, social clubs, fraternities, and neighborhoods — was not a metaphor. It was a documented practice, used by Black institutions, against Black people, well into the twentieth century. The “blue vein societies” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were social organizations for Black Americans whose skin was light enough to reveal the blue veins beneath — an explicit, formalized, institutionalized sorting of Black people by proximity to whiteness.

These are not ancient history. The organizational constitutions, the membership records, the documented admission practices of these institutions have been preserved and studied by historians. They represent something that the contemporary conversation about colorism rarely confronts with sufficient directness: this hierarchy was not merely imposed by white supremacy. It was adopted, maintained, and enforced by Black people themselves, long after the plantation system that created it had been dismantled.

“The paper bag test was not a metaphor. It was a documented practice, used by Black institutions, against Black people, for the better part of a century. The hierarchy white supremacy created, Black communities maintained.”

The Modern Economic Data

If colorism were merely a historical curiosity, a relic of a crueler era that had faded with progress, it would be worth documenting but not worth the urgency of this essay. It has not faded. The economic data is current, comprehensive, and damning.

Arthur Goldsmith, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity Jr. published a study in 2006 that controlled for education, experience, occupation, and region — every variable that might explain earnings differences — and found that lighter-skinned Black Americans earned 10–15% more than darker-skinned Black Americans with identical qualifications. This is not a white-versus-Black wage gap. This is a gap within the Black community, between Black people, measured in dollars, and it persists after controlling for every variable except the shade of the worker’s skin.

The criminal justice system replicates this hierarchy with documented precision. Jill Viglione, Lance Hannon, and Robert DeFina analyzed sentencing data for Black women in North Carolina and found that darker-skinned Black women received sentences approximately 12% longer than lighter-skinned Black women convicted of similar offenses with similar criminal histories. Twelve percent. That is not a perception gap or an attitude survey. It is measured in days and months and years spent in a cell, and the skin color of the woman in the cell is a statistically significant predictor of how long she stays there — even when the comparison is entirely between Black women.

The educational research tells the same story from a different angle. Darker-skinned Black students report lower academic self-concept, lower perceived attractiveness, and higher rates of disciplinary action compared to lighter-skinned Black students, even within the same schools and the same classrooms. Verna Keith and Cedric Herring, using data from the National Survey of Black Americans, demonstrated that skin color was a significant predictor of educational attainment, income, and occupational status among Black Americans — effects that persisted after controlling for parental socioeconomic status.

The Mirror on the Wall

The media representation data makes the internal hierarchy visible in a way that no one with functioning eyes can deny. Jenifer Wilder and Colleen Cain analyzed the skin tones of Black women featured on the covers of major magazines and in leading roles in film and television, and found a systematic overrepresentation of lighter-skinned Black women. The Black woman who is held up as the standard of beauty in American media — the one cast as the love interest, the one photographed for the cover, the one selected for the music video — is disproportionately lighter-skinned. This is not only the preference of white media executives. It is replicated in Black media, in Black music videos, in Black-owned publications, in the casting decisions of Black directors and producers.

The dating market makes the hierarchy intimate and personal. Celeste Curington, Jennifer Lundquist, and Ken-Hou Lin, in their comprehensive study of racial preferences on dating platforms, documented that skin-color preferences operate within the Black community — that darker-skinned Black women receive fewer messages and fewer matches than lighter-skinned Black women, and that this preference is expressed by Black men as well as men of other races. The hierarchy that began on the plantation has been imported into the most private domain of human choice, and it operates there with the same quiet efficiency that it operates in the labor market and the courtroom.

The Children Who Pay

The psychological literature on the effects of colorism on Black children is the most difficult part of this research to read, because it describes damage being done to the people who can least defend against it, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them. Verna Keith and Carla Thompson, in their study of self-esteem among Black adolescents, found that darker-skinned Black girls reported significantly lower self-esteem, lower perceived physical attractiveness, and lower social self-concept than lighter-skinned Black girls — differences that persisted after controlling for family income, parental education, and other socioeconomic variables.

These findings mean something specific. They mean that there are dark-skinned Black girls growing up in Black families, attending Black churches, surrounded by Black community, who are learning — from the comments of relatives, from the images in media, from the preferences expressed on every screen they look at — that they are less beautiful, less desirable, less valuable than their lighter-skinned peers. They are learning this not from white supremacists. They are learning it from us. From the aunt who comments that a newborn is “nice and light.” From the grandmother who warns against marrying “too dark.” From the cousin who calls it “just a joke.” From the rapper whose video features exclusively light-skinned or biracial women. From the culture that has absorbed the slaveholder’s aesthetic hierarchy so completely that it no longer recognizes it as borrowed.

The Global Industry of Self-Erasure

The skin-lightening industry is valued at approximately $8.6 billion globally and is projected to exceed $12 billion by 2027. The primary consumers are dark-skinned people in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the African diaspora. The products contain hydroquinone, mercury, and corticosteroids — chemicals that damage the liver, the kidneys, and the nervous system with documented regularity. The World Health Organization has published warnings about the health consequences of skin-bleaching products. And the industry continues to grow, because the hierarchy of shade operates globally, and the demand for lighter skin is a demand that dark-skinned people are willing to poison themselves to satisfy.

This is not a minor cosmetic preference. It is a multi-billion-dollar monument to internalized racial hierarchy, and it is sustained by demand from within the communities it damages. No white supremacist is standing in a store in Lagos or Kingston or Atlanta forcing a dark-skinned woman to buy bleaching cream. She is buying it because the hierarchy — the one that began on the plantation, the one that was maintained by the paper bag test, the one that is visible on every magazine cover and in every music video — has taught her that her natural skin is a problem to be solved. And the community that should be telling her otherwise is, in too many cases, the community that taught her to think this way in the first place.

The Voices That Are Changing It

The conversation is not entirely silence. Lupita Nyong’o, whose dark skin was treated as a novelty by the entertainment industry that celebrated her, has spoken publicly about the colorism she experienced growing up in Kenya and in Hollywood — about praying for lighter skin as a child, about the moment she stopped praying and started refusing. Khoudia Diop, the Senegalese model whose deep-dark complexion became the basis of a global modeling career, has built a platform explicitly challenging the hierarchy of shade. These are not token gestures. They are acts of cultural insurgency against a hierarchy that has been in place for centuries.

Anti-colorism education is emerging in schools and community organizations, though it remains far less developed than anti-racism education directed at external discrimination. The Perception Institute, the Association of Black Psychologists, and scholars like Margaret Hunter have been developing curricula and intervention models designed to make the internal hierarchy visible, speakable, and ultimately unsustainable. But these efforts are swimming against a current that runs through the deepest channels of Black culture — the family, the church, the beauty salon, the barbershop, the bedroom — and changing it will require not just education but the kind of honest, painful, inward-facing reckoning that is always harder than pointing the finger outward.

“No white supremacist is standing in a store forcing a dark-skinned woman to buy bleaching cream. She is buying it because the community that should be telling her she is beautiful as she is has taught her to think otherwise.”

The Door Left Open

I have written extensively in these pages about the external forces that have damaged Black America — the policies, the institutions, the documented systems of discrimination that have extracted wealth, destroyed communities, and shortened lives. I have written about these things because they are real and because they matter. But I write about colorism today because it is the thing we do to ourselves, and it is therefore the thing that only we can stop.

White supremacy created the hierarchy of shade. White slaveholders created the distinction between the house and the field, between the light and the dark, between the closer-to-white and the farther-from-white. This is historical fact. But white supremacy did not create the paper bag test in 1920. Black institutions did. White supremacy did not create the skin-bleaching industry’s customer base in 2026. Black and brown consumers did. White supremacy did not create the preference for lighter-skinned women in Black music videos, on Black magazine covers, and in Black dating preferences. Black culture did. And the pretense that this hierarchy is still, in 2026, primarily a function of white imposition rather than Black maintenance is a dishonesty so convenient, so flattering, so perfectly designed to avoid the discomfort of self-examination, that it has been allowed to persist for generations while dark-skinned children absorb the message that they are worth less.

A community that fights external racism while practicing internal color hierarchy has not yet decided to be free. It has decided to be comfortable — comfortable with a structure that benefits some of its members at the expense of others, comfortable with a beauty standard borrowed from the oppressor, comfortable with the silence that allows aunts and grandmothers and music producers and casting directors and potential partners to sort human beings by the concentration of melanin in their skin. That comfort is a cage, and the door is open, and the lock is on the inside. The slaveholder built the hierarchy. We are the ones who kept it. And we are the only ones who can tear it down — not by demanding that someone else acknowledge our beauty, but by deciding, collectively and without equivocation, that every shade of Black is equally Black, equally beautiful, and equally worthy of the love and opportunity that this community owes to all of its children. That decision is ours alone to make. And every day we do not make it, another dark-skinned child learns the lesson we should have unlearned a century ago.