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Black America (Still) Has a Problem With Dark Skinned Women
Anyone can harbor sentiments of anti-Blackness, including Black people
Anti-Blackness isn’t just the domain of prejudiced White people. People of color can experience marginalization based on race and still harbor anti-Blackness. A Black person can feel the sting of racism and also be a purveyor of bias and harm towards other Black people.
In case you think this is impossible, let me pull the receipts.
On New Year’s Day, a Vanity Fair film critic, K. Austin Collins, who is Black, and a web editor for Harper’s Magazine, Violet Lucca who is White, criticized the features of Beyoncé and Jay Z’s daughter, Blue Ivy. They lamented that the child, who is just seven-years-old, would eventually inherit her father’s facial features, that of a wide nose and full lips, and insinuated that she would eventually need plastic surgery in order to be attractive.
Also on January 1, a Twitter user who goes by the name King Kwasi, compared singers Ari Lennox and Teyana Taylor to rottweilers. Comparing Black women to dogs is nothing new. Last month, NBA player Patrick Patterson referred to Black women as bulldogs. And in 2018, President Donald Trump called his one-time advisor (and former White House staffer) Omarosa Manigault Newman a dog.
