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Thanks to outspoken celebrities like Lupita Nyong’o, the discrimination faced by darker-skinned black people is finally being noticed. But we still have a long way to go
In the past week, two high-profile black women, the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o have spoken candidly about not having experienced racism until they arrived in the United States. Like Adichie, Nyong’o didn’t experience discrimination on the basis of her skin colour per se, but on the basis of how dark she was comparatively. She was a victim of one of the last openly accepted “isms”: colourism, the preferential treatment of lighter-skinned individuals compared with their darker-skinned counterparts.
Nyong’o referred to colourism as “the daughter of racism”, explaining that she was once told at an audition that she was “too dark” for television. Continue reading...