The thing about Light skinned women

I’m putting my hands up to it. It’s official: light skinned women are officially in fashion. For some years I’ve denied it. “Yes most music video girls are kind of Spanishey coloured, straight-haired, blue eyed (but with undeniably African lips and hips) but we’ve still got Naomi Campbell!”. I’m not sure when it started. Somewhere after Blaxploitation movies and Grace Jones and Whitney Houston came the massive airbrushing. I’m just blogging, not politicking. All I know is women talk about this, ALOT. Furthermore of all the things they debate this is always the most interesting. What I do know is I am as big a fan of Serena Williams as I am of Jade Johnson. I’d cut myself in two for Kelly Rowland and Alicia Keys. Gabrielle Union versus Meagan Good? Stop it! By a highly scientific and empirical method (not really) I’ve identified the three most quoted reasons for this and discuss them below. Then I offered a fourth and my personal favourite reason. Since this fourth is my thinking and therefore one you haven’t heard before feel free to skip the first 3 if you have somewhere to be.

Possible Reason number 1: The Slavery thing
The light skinned as we call them were first produced as the daughters of Slave masters, in America and the West Indies and the children on colonial overlords in Africa. These mixed race offspring as a rule had an easier life than the fully Black counterparts. Sometimes, their father/owner got them a near standard education. Even if they didn’t they certainly weren’t assigned the worse jobs. This meant that for a slave or colonially indentured servant to get married to a son/daughter of a White man…they would be only easy street! So is that the thing with light-skinned women. A cultural throwback to when a mixed race woman was a status symbol and meant access to a better way of life than a Black man or woman?

Possible Reason number 2: It’s The Media!
The mass media (read Rupert Murdoch and other shady White men) are elevating light-skinned mostly White women over Black-Black women in an attempt to make those of us without the blessing of Caucasian genes in our pool feel inferior. But can this be working? White people also want Black people to be on time, stop complaining and stop playing our music loud and we don’t listen to them! Why should we be listening to them on this?! The ‘mass media versus us’ is the stuff that makes up the content of underground docu DVDs sold by men with dreadlocks and knowing looks at your local market. White owned BET, MTV etc shove an ever fading Beyoncé in our faces at every opportunity. Beyoncé has a successful career, a billionaire husband. “It’s because she’s light skinned –that’s WHY!” Is that how it’s supposed to work? Then misguided women aspire to be like Beyoncé in ways that go beyond the healthy appreciation of her music and her amazing backside. The not so misguided women then follow suite after the first lot have created a fashion. This in turn contributes to:

Possible Reason number 3: Self loathing.
Black people see only the negatives in our respective communities (in the Americas, Europe and Africa) and see what order exists in well developed white communities and …cue skin bleaching, weaves. If you bleach your skin are you actually secretly aspiring to be want to be White? Let me know.

We do have the same right to neuroses as everybody else. I know dark chocolate coloured, Kenyan Black, Alek Wek coloured black women. Fine too! They can’t trip over without a dozen mans jumping to the ground first to break their fall. God is an artist and a democrat. He has created the buff and the butters, the fit and the fu-ugly in all colours and shades. I find skin bleaching isn't a dark–skinned problem. It's an ugly one. I've not known a dark-skinned woman -beautiful in the first place to go for that. It’s unhealthy and it never looks right. Women with lighter skin than they should have, veins all over the place, face ‘yellow’ but knuckles as black as tar!

When all is said and done skin bleaching is just the Black woman's plastic surgery. I’m shallow. I like big things on women. Most sisters come with the fuller lips, hips and tits as standard that white women go under the knife for so they’ve found their own ‘problem’. Without a handy insecurity to focus on, a whole group of women might actually have to be happy with how they look. This of course can never happen. Women have to have something to hate about themselves and it’s not always men’s fault.

Possible Reason number 4: Light skinned women are our blondes!
Try not to lose me as I get scientific on you. Not for long though. I was reading about blondes somewhere. It might have been from wikipedia so don’t quote me or hold me to this. Mr Sociologist had an interesting reason why Blondes are so popular in the English speaking West. (This is about White blonde women, not Lil’Kim and them hood girls you know. They’re popular for a different reason.) Blonde women are native to Sweden and Finland and other colder than London places. When the Swedish started coming over to Britain in the middle ages they were calling themselves Vikings and kicking arse so it was a while before blonde women were readily available to the populace that would fill the British Isles and later America and Australia. Blonde women were considered exotic and must have accessories for the man about Londinium town. A thousand years later blondes are still the in thing…And sometimes more fun and less intelligent. I don’t know about all that –that’s debate for the White people to have.

My point is light skinned women didn’t readily exist 500 years ago. I like to think that light-skinned women are the new girls in town so they might be the in-thing for another minute on history’s clock.