One of my oldest and best friends, Angela Shannon and I were talking one evening over a glass of wine. We began talking about race and color in our experience. We talked about the way that each of our families handled skin color. Angie comes from a family that has multiple shades, from the lightest light to a deep pecan brown. She has the experience of growing up with her lighter cousins. She recalled that she some how felt as though she was the darkest of dark browns and a little less than. Yet, there were members of her family that made sure that there were no differences in how light, dark or medium shades were treated.
She told me the story of her mom and her aunt. Angie’s mom Mildred is a pretty shade of brown and her aunt Wanda, well, can pass for white. The two of them were traveling by car in the 1990s. They stopped at a gas station to refuel and get a cold drink on a Summer afternoon. When Mildred went in to get a soda from the soda machine, she realized it was broken, so she asked the attendant where she could get a drink. He pointed her in the direction of the sodas. He then told her, “they are over there; they are hot.” She thought that this was the only option.
Then Wanda walks into the store and asks the same question she too realizing that the machine was not working. The gas station attendant, came around to talk to her, escorted her to the back where he showed her where the sodas were and told her, “there is ice here, so you can have a cold one.”
This is how colorism works. The darker sister is denied, what the lighter sister has easy access to. The gas station attendant was surprised to see Wanda share her cold soda with Mildred. Afterward, Mildred told him what she thought. They smiled and told him, they were sisters.
In my immediate family, all of us are beige: mom, dad and three girls. So we lived in a world where there was no issues in our house, yet outside– well, that was a different story. I was taunted, teased and punched in the face because of my light skin. Yet, because I was not raised in a family of privilege, (Although I could have been….my father’s family was solidly African American elite. My grandfather was a baptist preacher), I learned to navigate the Black community with a tenacity that did not allow me to rest on light skin privilege.
Although I must admit that I was often privileged because of my lighter shade. I was given job opportunities that many of my darker sisters did not get. As I have mentioned before, when I took a call in a predominately white congregation, I was told by one of the members, “You are not so bad because you are not so dark.” The congregation would subsequently understand that I was proud of my Black heritage. For now, I’ll let my friend’s family story make the point.
We’re talking and I am still ruminating on being beige.
On Being Beige 