Is colorism still a problem?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
Kim, what do you-- what do you think about that?
Do you think colorism is a problem, is still a problem?
I think it is still a problem.
I think it's getting better, much better, but it's among us.
You know, that's the--
[APPLAUSE]
And it is.
And that becomes from the very beginning of time,
because when, you know, we had the light skinned people
in the house, and the darker you are,
the further you are in the field.
So, yeah, that was-- that was ingrained in us.
So we're not that many generations away.
I think it's getting better now, like the sister with no hair,
and this one right here, dark chocolate.
And you see all these beautiful colors
and we're embracing each other.
You know, my mother--
I thought she was white until I was nine years old.
That's a problem.
And one day, I went home, and I was like, you white, Mama?
And then she cussed me out like she was black,
so then I knew that she was a black woman.
So, and, my father was is very dark.
You know?
So I had all these different shades in my family,
but we never in our family said, like, oh, you light skinned,
you brown skinned.
We never had that in our family.
But outside and in the community, we have it.
I went to Fisk University and they would say,
oh, you can't run for Miss Fisk, or you too light,
or you can't-- I was like, too light?
What's happening here?
I'm at a black college!
It's us, though.
It's us, I'm telling you. - It's us.
We do it to us.
Yeah, it's us.
And remember, I was saying earlier,
we can't expect people to do what we have not figured
out how to do ourselves.
I have a father that is blond hair and blue eyed,
so what he-- he would always tell
me how the difference in them--
what was that look for?
I apologize.
OK, go ahead.
One more time.
It was judgement.
I apologize.
It was judge-- yeah.
All right.
But we do it to ourselves.
We do
I think we take-- we minimize things
that really become big later.
I'm going to bring in a couple of folks here.
The way we think about color, the closer you are to whiteness
and lightness, good.
The closer you get to darkness and black, dirty, bad.
We already are black, and so we're already labeled as dirty,
bad.
It's not black people's fault that when
I see the light skinned girl that I think she's better
or she got more privilege than me, because that's what
the white people tell me, that's what these stories tell me,
that's what television tells me.
And so we have to think of it with a different lens of it's
not our fault. This is what they told us,
and we have to fight against that,
and think more on the grounds of we are black people.
We are people.
I'm gonna come right here.
Growing up, I didn't have real good support from my mom.
She was really color struck.
We're the same color.
And my mom did not love her color, so growing up,
I didn't know how to love myself.
I used to be the girl, if I have to buy a weave,
because if I don't, nobody is going to like me.
And now, I cut off all of my hair,
because that's something I've always wanted to do.
And I was terrified to do it, because I
was like, people are going to hate me so
much for cutting off my hair.
But when I did it, I felt so beautiful and free.
Nobody could tell me anything at that point.
I was a beautiful black woman with short hair,
and you can't tell me anything about myself.
[APPLAUSE]
Black people aren't the only people
that have colorism issues.
I think the challenge for the black community
is that we've internalized it and we've
made it more vicious than it has to be in today's society.
There are many people on Twitter who comment on how dark I am.
I'm medium tone.
I'm too dark for some, I'm too light for others,
and for a lot of them, I'm too round.
But our opportunity is to decide who we intend
to be in the space and how we're going to treat
others in that space with us.
Because whether we see the prejudice
or we see the privilege, there are those who are making
decisions about us, and they are imposing those decisions on us
when they hire, when they fire, when they send a preschooler
to time out, or when they send a teenager to prison,
those choices are being made.
So we can't dismiss that it exists,
but we can build the protections around ourselves so that we
aren't doing it internally.
Do you think it's changing very much?
Yes, I mean, it's absolutely getting better,
because we talk about it.
When you deny a problem, you can't fix the problem.
And I think what's helpful for all of us
is that we're actually talking about this as an issue,
and we're talking about solutions.
Ma'am, I'd love to hear from you.
I am light skinned, but I have never been treated
like I was white in my life.
I've always been black.
I've never-- I've never felt any different from anybody else.
And when I go to work, when I went to school,
I was treated like a black woman.
I was disrespected like a black woman.
So it bothers me when people think
because you're light skinned, you're treated differently.
I have never had that advantage in my life.