When we speak of racial injustice, we often conflate it with a related but separate issue that operates through different mechanisms and affects far more people worldwide. Colorism, the discrimination based on skin tone within racial and ethnic groups, creates hierarchies that transcend the black-and-white framework that dominates discussions of racism. It functions as a parallel system of prejudice, one that cuts across continents and cultures with remarkable consistency, often affecting populations that racism alone cannot fully explain.
The distinction matters because colorism operates within communities as much as between them. A dark-skinned Nigerian faces prejudice not merely from white Europeans but from lighter-skinned Nigerians who may share identical ethnic heritage, language, and cultural practices. The same dynamic appears across South Asia, where the fairness obsession has spawned a multi-billion-dollar skin-lightening industry despite the absence of a significant white population to emulate. In Latin America, the spectrum of mestizo identities creates elaborate gradations of privilege based on proximity to European phenotypes, while in East Asia, pale skin remains historically associated with nobility and outdoor labor with lower status.
These patterns predate European colonialism, though colonial powers certainly exploited and reinforced them. Ancient civilizations from Egypt to China developed aesthetic hierarchies privileging lighter complexions long before contact with the West. In many societies, the association between darkness and outdoor labor, between fairness and the leisure of indoor life, became codified into social stratification. The caste system in South Asia incorporated color associations that predated British rule by millennia. Japanese beauty standards emphasized white skin during the Heian period, centuries before Commodore Perry’s ships appeared in Tokyo Bay.
What makes colorism perhaps more pervasive than racism is its ubiquity within supposedly homogeneous populations. Racism requires difference, the perception of distinct racial categories. Colorism requires only variation, the natural spectrum of melanin expression within any group. It can function in societies where everyone shares the same ethnic identity, the same language, the same religious tradition. A Korean discriminating against a darker-skinned Korean is not practicing racism by any standard definition, yet the prejudice is real, economically consequential, and psychologically damaging.
The mechanisms of colorism differ from racism in subtle but important ways. Racism often relies on pseudoscientific theories of biological difference, on constructed narratives of inherent superiority and inferiority. Colorism frequently operates through aesthetic preference, through the language of beauty and desirability that masks structural discrimination. It is easier to dismiss or deny because it can hide behind personal taste, behind the supposedly innocuous preference for a certain look. Yet these preferences aggregate into systematic disadvantage in marriage markets, employment opportunities, media representation, and judicial outcomes.
Research consistently demonstrates that darker-skinned individuals within the same ethnic group face measurable disadvantages. In the United States, studies show that darker-skinned African Americans receive longer prison sentences than lighter-skinned African Americans for identical crimes, controlling for all other factors. Darker-skinned Mexican Americans earn less than their lighter-skinned counterparts with equivalent education and experience. Similar patterns emerge in Brazil, where racial categories are fluid but skin tone predicts socioeconomic outcomes with disturbing precision. The correlation holds across the Caribbean, across Africa, across Asia.
The global skin-lightening industry, valued in the billions, testifies to the internalization of these hierarchies. Products promising fairness flood markets from Mumbai to Lagos, from Bangkok to Kingston, often containing dangerous ingredients like mercury and high-dose steroids. The demand reveals not self-hatred exactly, but a rational response to social realities where lighter skin correlates with better treatment, better prospects, better lives. The industry profits from insecurity that colorist societies systematically produce.
Media representation amplifies and normalizes these preferences. Bollywood stars, K-pop idols, and Latin American telenovela actors display a remarkably narrow range of skin tones given the diversity of their audiences. The casting choices reflect and reinforce the association between lightness and desirability, between darkness and marginality. Even when productions aim for diversity, the selected representatives often cluster toward the lighter end of their group’s spectrum, creating a feedback loop where visibility itself becomes color-coded.
Addressing colorism requires different strategies than anti-racist work. Legal frameworks designed to prevent racial discrimination often fail to capture intra-group bias. A dark-skinned Indian denied housing by a lighter-skinned Indian landlord may have no recourse under laws prohibiting discrimination based on race or national origin. Employment discrimination laws similarly struggle with candidates rejected for not matching the preferred aesthetic, a criterion that remains legally defensible in most jurisdictions while producing systematically exclusionary outcomes.
Education must acknowledge colorism’s distinct history and operation. Children need to recognize how aesthetic hierarchies form, how they connect to but differ from racial prejudice, how they damage self-concept and community solidarity alike. The conversation requires nuance, the willingness to discuss painful preferences within groups that external racism already pressures. It means confronting the grandparent who praises a light-skinned grandchild’s beauty, the family that worries about a dark-skinned daughter’s marriage prospects, the casual comments about staying out of the sun that accumulate into toxic shame.
The global nature of colorism suggests universal human tendencies toward hierarchy-making, toward the association of physical traits with moral or social worth. Yet universality does not mean inevitability. Societies can and do change their aesthetic standards, can challenge the automatic privileging of lightness, can build solidarity across the melanin spectrum. The work requires recognizing colorism as its own phenomenon, not merely a subset or symptom of racism, deserving its own analysis and its own remedies.
Only by separating the two can we address each with appropriate precision, acknowledging that a world free of racism might still contain colorism, and that eliminating both requires understanding how they intersect, reinforce each other, and occasionally operate independently. The struggle for justice must account for the full complexity of how humans judge each other by the color of their skin, whether across racial lines or within them.
