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- There continues to be a schism

between light girls and dark girls.

- [Woman] Team light skin, Team Dark Skinned.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

- They thought that I thought I was all that.

- Black women have been cultured to compare

and not connect.

- [Woman] They threatened me every day.

- They would take my earrings

so they would split my earlobes.

- You don't know you're different

until someone tells you you're different.

- Oh, poor little you, light girl.

- [Young Woman] I never thought I was any of those things.

- [Woman] You can't choose who you're born.

- You're black but you're not really black.

- I don't prefer this complexion.

- I never wanted my son to be embarrassed by me.

- [Woman] It hurts more when it's coming from your own.

- Pretty is as pretty does.

- Harriet Tubman said, "I freed 1,000 slaves

"and I could've freed 1,000 more

"if they only knew they were slaves."

(somber orchestral music)

- Although this is a new millennium, the new age,

the 21st century, I believe that as people of color

we have a cellular memory that has come forward

from generation to generation to generation.

And one of those cellular memories,

one of those things that continue to plague us,

I believe is this issue

of value and worth being associated with the shade

or the color of your skin.

It's cellular that our lighter skinned foremothers

or great-great-grandmothers got privilege,

got notice, got recognition because they were closer

to white than they were to African.

It's cellular that the darker women were in the fields.

The darker women were bred more.

The darker women were beaten more.

The darker women were sold faster.

It's cellular.

And that whole issue of value and worth

based on the color of your skin,

the texture of your hair, the shape of your features,

the straighter the nose, the thinner the lips,

makes you more beautiful,

makes you more valuable and more worthy.

It has been etched and impressed in our DNA.

- The product of slave masters

raping black slaves was part of what produced

a lighter skinned population.

- Both my parents are black

and both of their families lived through the terrorism

that we know as Jim Crow.

(dramatic orchestral music)

My mother had to marry someone that looked like my father,

quite honestly, because my grandmother

in her post-traumatic stress

had her participate in the paper bag fear.

- There were a series of tests, quote unquote tests,

that different black organizations used

to clarify who should be a member in the group.

And many of us are familiar with things

like the brown paper bag test

where the idea was that your skin should be lighter

than a brown paper bag in order to be in the organization.

Or a comb test where if you could pass a comb

through your hair that you had straight enough hair

to be in whatever high status organization it was.

- Down where I came from

they would hammer that bag right outside the church

and if you were too dark, darker than that bag,

you weren't gettin' into church, of all places.

Church!

- Unfortunately we've internalized norms that are alien.

And as pertains to skin color, that's probably

the most potent alien norm

that has come by way of colonization.

(somber music)

- My grandmother, her generation was about life.

And living in Jim Crow South,

if your cousin was dark, he could disappear in the night

and you could see him the next day

burnt and hanging from a tree

with his genitals in his mouth.

So, if you're a 14 or 15 year-old girl and you see that,

who then do you become?

- From our very beginning

we have been put against each other,

and it's probably not surprising

that a certain amount of us would accept that separation.

- I've always had people

tell me that if we were in slavery,

that I'd be in the house.

And I'm like, if we were in slavery we'd be in slavery.

Like, what does my location matter?

Like bein' in the house was so much better.

You know what it is to get beat up by white women?

You know you can beat but you can't hit back,

you know what I mean?

You're gettin' raped.

You're goin' through all of this stuff in the house.

It wasn't like luxury.

You weren't rollin' around, you know,

taking SATs and reading and writing novels.

- We've been programmed to think

that somehow the hue, the differences in our hues,

are some external gauge of our character

and the things that we walk around inside.

And the funny thing is it's not the white people

that attribute that to us.

Maybe in the beginning, but we inside ourselves

are like, no, brother, I don't like you, 'cause you light.

That's our problem.

We haven't dealt with that.

So until we deal with it, it'll be here.

- This is a generational,

I don't know if we should call it heritage,

but it's certainly a generational legacy

among people of African descent here in the United States.

- We barely even call it terrorism.

We don't say that Jim Crow was homeland terrorism.

We don't call the Ku Klux Klan terrorist.

We call them white hate groups.

This is like growing up in Afghanistan or Iraq.

It was war, it was terrifying.

It was a horror.

(dramatic orchestral music)

(people shouting)

(fire crackling)

My grandmother left Sumter, South Carolina

with the idea that if you are light you literally live.

That's what she grew through,

that was her reality.

She wanted her children to live, that plain.

And that's why it wasn't like,

oh, marry white and be not black.

She wanted you to be black,

but she wanted you to be black and live.

- Passing entailed a tremendous amount of personal loss

because it meant that

people were separated from their families.

They couldn't be with people who looked black

if they were passing as white.

- You know, passing is not just about skin tone.

Passing is deciding, "I don't associate

"with my parents anymore."

"I don't associate with my siblings."

Passing is not just, "Ooh, I'm light-skinned."

Passing is,

I pretend that that woman there is not my mother.

- My grandfather's brother passed, you know.

He married a white lady, okay.

They move to Detroit, he's a doctor.

They had a daughter, one single daughter.

She never knew she was black.

She gets married to an Air Force officer, guess what?

(snaps fingers)

That first baby comes out, guess what?

She didn't know.

He left her.

She didn't know.

- There's a story actually from my own family

of a distant cousin of mine.

When she graduated from high school

her mother told her that she wanted her

to move to California and pass as a white woman.

She moved to California.

She marries a white man.

She has white children who have no idea

about her past and then years later

she receives a very inconvenient phone call

and it's her mother calling,

and she's calling to tell her

that her father is dying and she needs to come back home.

And the woman says, "Well, I can't come back home.

"I'm white now.

"This is the life that you created for me.

"This is the life that you made me live.

"I can't just come back to the south side of Chicago,

"that's impossible."

It's stories like that where I think

you really start to get

a sense of how deep the losses were.

- There's a long history of racial categorization

of multi-racial people in the U.S.

And so, initially, even during slavery

there was a differentiation

between blacks and mulattoes.

And mulattoes were considered people

who were mixed, black and white,

and they didn't have the privileges that whites had

and they didn't really have even intermediary privileges.

- At one point during the Antebellum period

there was an attempt to construct

a three-tiered racial system in Louisiana,

for example, because those mixed race persons

could not be regarded as white,

but they did not want to be regarded as black as well.

- What has happened in New Orleans, people who,

particularly in the black community,

who are light-skinned or fair,

they can pass for white because they benefit

from many of the opportunities there

and these are passe bruns,

or people who are basically not white

but are passing for white.

- They used terms like quadroons and octaroons.

People who had one black grandparent,

for example, would be quadroons, 1/4th black,

or octoroons, about an eighth black.

But these different designations

were all considered ways of being black

and this is in the larger context of the one drop rule.

- In the 1870 census you see instructions

that essentially say that a person

can only identify as white if they do not have

one drop, even one drop, of black blood.

And there's a judge and basically what he says is,

let's be careful about how narrowly we define whiteness,

because if we define it too strictly,

there are a lot of white people who aren't going

to be able to pass the test.

This is almost like a ball of yarn,

and we don't wanna start pulling at it

because if we do our whole system could unravel.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- There's a safety in being able to

categorize you, or categorize a person.

You can assign all of your pre-conceived ideas

about who this person is, the type of person they are,

what kind of behavior you can expect from them,

only if you know what they are.

- People always asked me, before they asked my name,

the question was, "So, what are you?"

- What are you?

- Oh, no, but what are you really?

People always say to me, "What are you?"

And I'm African American.

I don't discuss it.

I'm not one to talk about, "Oh, but my grandmother

"and my grandfather,"

I don't do that.

(light orchestral music)

- There used to be a coat store, like a dress shop

and I remember going into that store

and finding a jacket that I loved,

and I went and brought it to the register

and the woman said to me, "What are you?"

And I said, "Oh, I'm black."

And she said, "No, no, you're not black

"'cause black people are thieves."

(chuckles)

"So, what are you?"

And I remember thinking,

wow, I love this coat, and now I have to put this coat back.

(cash register dings)

- People sometimes felt more free

to say things like, "You're black,

"but you're not really black."

And they used to say it like it was a compliment.

Like, congratulations, you've arrived!

(laughs)

And I always felt so, like it was an identity crisis.

I am black, but you keep telling me I'm not.

(light guitar music)

- I identify as being mixed.

I do not identify as being black.

I do not identify as being black because to me

if somebody asks me what I am and I say black,

I feel like I'm ignoring my father and half of my family

and treating them as if they don't exist.

And to me, that feels wrong and that feels uncomfortable.

So, I've gotten into a lot of arguments with black women

because they feel like, as far as they're concerned,

I'm black and I should just say that I'm black.

- As a child,

the black girls said I wasn't black enough,

so they didn't wanna play with me.

And the white girls said I wasn't white enough

and they didn't wanna play

with me either, so I was basically a outcast.

I was told that I was a mutt.

It was really difficult.

- My mother is very fair-skinned,

my wife is very fair-skinned.

They've had to overcompensate to show their blackness,

to prove that they're black

around black people, which is crazy.

But that's the reality because the first time they meet

a black person sometimes it's,

"Oh, she thinks she's better than us," out the gate.

And so, what do they have to do?

They have to act a little more street,

act a little more, actually, I would say,

stereotypically black just to gain acceptance.

- I mean, think about it.

They're light-skinned and beautiful

by the world's standards, but still ain't white.

Right?

You're too dark to be white,

but you're too light to be black,

so here you are right in the middle and nobody wants you.

You're the perfect misfit.

So, you see the magazines,

you see the television commercials.

I mean, something as simple as selling Downy.

You don't see yourself.

You see this beautiful white woman and this blonde hair

and she's just, you know, just sailing through the house

just loving laundry.

(laughs)

Right?

You know?

And you think this is something to aspire to.

Why wouldn't you?

Psychologically I understand where that comes from.

When the very essence of who you are is ignored,

degredated, you feel invisible.

And if you feel invisible in the world,

what are you doing to try to get the attention?

- I think when people are

judging children because of the color of their skin,

I think those people are ignorant.

These children can't do nothin'.

They can't do anything.

These children have to sit here in the skin

that somebody else decided to have sex for and live with it.

That's your fault you're messin' them up.

And then they grow up and the kids have these issues.

You can't blame it on anyone.

You have to deal with your own issues now.

You can't blame it on anyone.

But you guys raised me.

You guys gave me this problem

and I can't blame it on anybody?

Does that make any kind of sense?

- My father was very, very, very dark,

is very, very, very dark.

My mother was very, very, I thought she was a white woman.

So that's the problem right there.

My mama was light.

I did tease her.

I was like, you white and I'ma get some DNA

on you 'cause you lyin'.

But now that we're talkin' about it,

maybe that is the thing.

I'm tryin' to be too black sometimes.

I've done the reverse thing because of my mother

being so fair and people thinking that she was white,

because of being teased.

People come in my house and they say,

"Why you got so much black art?"

"Why you got so much Africa around you?"

I never thought about it.

But I think I was tryin' to make up

for not being black enough, you know?

- I realize that being mixed is both a curse and a blessing.

It's a curse because you don't really belong anywhere,

but it's a blessing because you get to blend in everywhere.

It amazes me how race is subjective to some people.

And I was just told recently

that I'm not a real black person,

I'm not even part black person,

doesn't matter what grandaddy did or what he was about,

I don't know anything about the black experience

and I have no right because my skin color doesn't match.

I was led to believe if I was somebody else,

my life would be better.

Sorry.

It cheated me out of being who I am

and I'm now almost 40 figuring that out.

- I do remember one incident where

I'd just been bombarded with people

telling me that I wasn't black,

you know, as a compliment.

And I went to my dad and I was, like,

"Dad, am I not black enough?"

And I just remember, he started to cry

and he was so emotional,

and he just told me, you know,

"You are black enough.

"You are all the black that you need to be.

"You are beautiful, you are smart, you are caring

"and charismatic, and don't let anyone

"tell you any different."

- I have albinism so I'm a lot lighter

than everyone in my family.

I'm the only one

that looks this way.

(dramatic orchestral music)

Growin' up I was called names like Casper, white bread.

I was always told that I was ugly.

Even my brother when I was younger,

he was embarrassed and I overheard him

telling some of his friends

that I wasn't really his biological sister,

that I was adopted.

Our race can be very cruel.

When I go to different places, people think that I'm white.

I just don't expect to get certain things

from my people, especially in church.

Some people don't wanna touch my hand.

Some people don't wanna talk to me

and some people have even said,

"What's this white girl doin' here?"

Once I had my son, I never wanted my son

to be embarrassed by me,

so I wouldn't go to school right away.

I would make his father go

because I just didn't want children to tease him

because I was his mother.

- They used to call me white girl.

- White girl.

- You're light bright.

- Damn near white.

- Yellow girl.

- You're not a real black girl.

- She'd say, "Fluffy kitty,"

and then she'd touch my nose and say, "Beep, beep, beep."

- You're pale.

You're not black.

- You think you're white.

- Skank nasty yellow.

- Banana.

- [Woman] Blue-eyed devil.

- The orange bitch.

- Lollipop tar.

- Other than.

- Stop it.

We have to stop it.

(dramatic drum beat)

- I think the impact that colorism

has on young girls, light girls and dark girls,

leaves scars on the soul that live well into womanhood.

- From a very young age

then I was made to feel that something about

what I had or looked like was somehow

both special and yet disliked, hated.

Something to be embraced

and or fear.

- I had rocks thrown at my head.

I had the, "You think you cute,

"I should cut your hair off."

Like, two ponytails, they wanted to cut

one of my ponytails off.

I'm goin', why?

Why do you even care?

What is the big deal?

And I think that we're not taught

to value one another enough.

- The colorism that exists in our community

was sometimes as damaging

as racism, because it hurts more

when it's coming from your own.

- There were times, especially as a child,

where I suffered unnecessarily

and felt a lot of shame about being light,

about having long hair.

I'm sure that it feels like,

oh, poor little you, light girl.

You know, everybody was kind of paying attention to you,

but you know, the lightness of my skin

didn't insulate me from questioning

my worthiness of being black.

- There were perceptions.

Oh, you're stuck up.

You're bougie.

- No matter what I did, what I said,

I was either thinkin' I'm too white.

I thought I was white, I thought I was better

than everybody else, you know, whatever.

I just thought I was all these things

and I never thought I was any of those things, so.

It made me not like myself.

- Children can be cruel.

They call you banana.

Light bulb.

- Yellow girl.

Redhead.

Blue-eyed devil.

- I was being called a banana,

being called white girl.

You know, really trying to identify

with my community and my people.

- They threatened me every day

(chuckles)

that they were gonna cut my hair.

And I actually had white kids on the school bus

who were hidin' me in the back of the bus

from the black kids who wanted to cut my hair.

- I went to a really bad elementary school

and this black girl, she was black and had real short hair

and I was beautiful and light-skinned

and had long, pretty, sandy color hair and she was jealous.

I didn't understand why.

What was the problem?

'Cause I wanted to be friends.

I was in a new city, in a new school,

and I was tryin' to make friends

and I didn't know what fighting was

and she came up to me and said some things

and I hit her and ran and fell in the water

and she beat me up.

(laughs)

And so I said, "I need to be funny 'cause I can't fight."

I can't fight.

I need to be funny.

(laughing)

And I was fat, too, so I was like,

I need somethin' that's gonna,

to cheer these people up.

These kids are horrible, ya know.

- When trauma happens,

it alters the cellular level.

I hate to get all doctor on it,

but it's the subcortical region of the brain

called the hippocampus.

It's where the memory is.

Once it moves into long-term potentiation,

what we call long-term potentiation, is the hippocampus.

It's there forever.

Right next to the hippocampus

is something called the amygdala.

What do you think it's responsible for?

Emotions.

So, you hear something.

What do you feel about it?

What do you remember about it?

So when you see it and as you grow,

by the time you're 15, 16, 17,

you're lookin' in the mirror and all you're hearing

are all the images you've heard

from the time you were a little girl.

You're damaged.

(dramatic drumbeat)

(somber music)

- I've heard of my friends that want to change

how they look because of people teasing them.

Sometimes they would tell them that

they don't belong there because they're black

or they're too light.

- I think it's a learned behavior.

I think the separation between dark skin and light skin

is a learned behavior.

You don't know you're different

until someone tells you you're different.

- My experience with colorism,

it's seen most starkly in middle school.

Middle school girls can be

the meanest human beings on earth.

I mean mean like,

like a rattlesnake mean.

Because they're dealing with their own issues

of self-esteem, one of the easiest marks

is a person's color.

In fact, it's interesting, they even take compliments

and turn them on their ear.

"You think you so pretty."

"You think you so smart."

So, the things that would seemingly stand out as a positive,

because of the real insidiousness

of internalized racism, and the basic issues

of self-esteem for young girls, it's really, really ugly.

(rhythmic hip-hop music)

- When I was in junior high

I had to look forward to every Friday

getting beat up by eight girls.

And they not only just beat me up,

they would tear my clothes off.

They would take my earrings until finally

I stopped wearin' 'em, but I've had to have surgery

because of it, but they would you know,

take my earrings so they would split my earlobes.

And it was very brutal.

If I went to the bathroom, that was their signal

to all run in the bathroom, rush in,

and whoop me and beat me down.

It got so bad that, I mean, like,

every Friday, it was almost like the principal was on cue.

You know, as soon as they had tore off all my clothes,

the principal would come out, put his coat over me,

call me a cab and send me home.

And so, if I didn't want that done during the week,

I wouldn't go to the bathroom.

- Two, three years ago I was in a club

and there was, like, four black girls

standin' a couple feet away from me

and they were talkin', "Oh, she thinks she's all that.

"She thinks she's all that, look at her."

And I wasn't doin' anything.

They jumped me and my homegirl,

and I was actually fighting one-on-one with one girl,

then one of her friends came and was like,

"I'm gonna kill you and she cut me."

(dramatic music)

(sirens wailing)

I didn't even know how bad it was

until I finally got out of there.

I got attacked because they thought

that I thought I was all that.

But this is a problem that I had to deal with comin' up

as a light-skinned girl and being too pretty.

I have to deal with black girls not liking me

because I'm not, you know, black enough.

(suspenseful music)

- Unfortunately,

I feel because of my skin color,

there's all colors, all races have suffered from pedophilia,

but in my environment

because I were the lighter one,

one of the first biracial children

in my family's generation with my grandmother,

I was like this golden child, piss color.

But the men, from the time I was two on up,

I felt like I was this little sex object

that was so beautiful.

From my experience, a lot of light-skinned girls

that are raised in families,

especially if it's a African American family,

the lighter girl gets the most, in my opinion,

most of the sexual abuse.

In my sleep I was being touched on.

In the streets I was being touched on

and I felt like a blow up doll.

- My best girlfriend and I,

we ran away from home pretty much

from the frying pan into the fire

thinking it must be better somewhere else

'cause I'm not about to get molested again.

I'm not about to get raped again.

(piano music)

We were taken off the street by a young couple.

They took us back to an apartment in Los Angeles.

It kind of reminds me of that film the Devil's Advocate

when I look back because their faces totally changed.

They broke out heroin, proceeded to beat us.

They put me in a bathtub, stripped my clothes off,

beat me up and just said, you know,

"You workin' for us now."

In the arena of human trafficking,

they call it an industry.

I don't like to call it an industry.

There is definitely a choice between dark skin, light skin.

So for me, that was the first time I realized

that it's not really great to be this

if the stigma is that I'm gonna make this guy

that I don't even know money

and I lost my virginity that way.

I lost it through the rapes, but the impact that,

a child doesn't, our brain doesn't develop

until we're 26 years old.

And so one of my favorite scriptures

is "Train up a child in the way that they should go,

"and when they are old, they will not depart from it."

But what happens when you grow up in lasciviousness?

You can't choose who you're born.

To whom you're born, where you're born,

the color of your skin, how much money

your parents gonna have,

if they're gonna raise you right or wrong.

You can't choose these things, so the fact

that we fight about these things is extraordinary.

We are missing the mark.

(dramatic drumbeat)

- [Man] I don't think so.

Charlamagne. When we come back we got the posse.

Don't go anywhere.

It's the Breakfast Club in the mornin'.

♪ Come on over here ♪

♪ Here ♪

♪ Yeah ♪

- My grandparents didn't go to my parents' wedding

because my mom is black.

You know, my grandparents were from China

and they came here and I think people

definitely have their own perceived notions

of what black people are like.

And I think growing up I always did feel

a little awkward around them

just because I know that they had a prejudice toward us.

But, you know, when I was growing up

all my friends were black.

So, they would come over to the house

and sometimes my family would be over there

and one of my grandparents might say something like,

"Oh, you better make sure you hide your car keys,"

and stuff like that.

- One thing I will always remember

is a friend of my mother's telling her

when I was very little that I was beautiful

and I'd be perfect if I didn't

have such Afrocentric features,

that my nose wasn't keen and my lips weren't thin.

And she was like, "But if her nose was right

"and her lips were right, she'd be perfect."

And then my mom choked her

and threw her out the house.

(laughs)

- My child's father is a dark-skinned man

and when we were havin' our kid,

I remember changing her

and someone in my family very close to me,

she was like I hope she don't get any darker than this.

And my mother, what was great,

my mother was there and my mother was like, "Stop it.

"Stop it right now."

So, I have to be very mindful of that

and I try not to have her, my daughter,

around her too much, like, especially alone,

just for that slip-up.

'Cause I know it could just take that one time

sayin' something negatively and it can impact her forever.

- With my family they feel like

they're more superior or better

than an African American

because we're Creole and we have culture

and that's something that I've battled with

most of my life.

It's more of, like, the older people in my family.

They didn't come to my wedding

because they didn't feel...

(somber piano music)

This is so difficult, sorry.

It's such a sensitive subject

that it's hard to explain yourself

without sounding mean or bitter or angry,

you know, but I am.

I'm angry that my family is like that.

And they

wanna pass so bad that they raised my mom

and my uncles and my aunts

to not fully know their culture,

and our younger generation, we've embraced it so much.

And I feel like that's why my father is white.

- My biological grandfather had an issue.

He took issue with the fact that his son

had produced two children with an African American woman.

That resulted in me not meeting him

until I was 16 years old.

I think I wasn't really allowing myself to feel.

I just thought that was kinda weird,

and his loss, and whatever.

But it wasn't a whatever, you know?

Later in life I had to deal with those emotions

and those feelings, and I remember my mom saying,

"You know what?

"Just go ahead.

"Just go ahead and meet him."

So, we went to the house,

a house that we had been to many times

but he would never be there.

The room was so tense.

There was so much tension and it was just him and I

lookin' eye to eye and he said, "Can I have a kiss?"

And I said, "No."

And he said, "Well, how about a hug?"

"No."

And he said, "Well, how about a handshake?"

I said, "That I can do,"

and I shook his hand.

(somber piano music)

(dramatic drumbeat)

(rhythmic drumming)

- This colorocracy and this color hierarchy

is not just unique to the United States,

but we find it in the Caribbean,

we find it in Latin America, we find it in Brazil,

in Panama, in Venezuela, in Jamaica, and so forth.

(rhythmic island music)

- My family's from the Caribbean.

And we do colorism so well.

(laughs)

We do it so well.

Light skin, yellow, red versus dark skin

and what's considered prettier.

- It is painful to say

but I do think that many people in Trinidad

think that lighter equals better

or lighter equals wealthy

or lighter equals somehow more capable

to do certain things, certain jobs, ya know.

So, I think that for some people who have

a lighter complexion, it is easier for them

in a certain way that is very sad

that that's still an ongoing thing.

- I mean, anywhere that there was colonialism

there was always divide and rule

and whatever they could divide us along,

we got divided and so we always aspired to be white

and those of us that had the lighter skin

were shown favor, and those who had the darker skin

were put in the fields.

(rhythmic drumming)

- It's not just happening in the black communities

here in America.

I mean, this is something that's happening in India.

Indians are actually very obsessed with fair skin

and not necessarily my kind of fair skin.

I'm mixed with Indian and white,

but full-blooded Indians who are very, very fair-skinned

are really seen as the top of the top.

(upbeat Indian music)

- It's quite simple.

Lighter skin implies that you're classier, basically.

The implication is that if you have darker skin,

and this goes way, way back,

your family, yourself have spent time

out doing manual labor under a hot sun

and that therefore you are by definition

of a lower caste, if you like.

(rhythmic drumming)

Asian people, they still have arranged marriages.

It's still quite dominant in the UK,

and parents advertise, if you like, in Asian magazines.

My parents used to get an Asian magazine.

They still do.

And two pages at the back are dedicated

to parents describing their children

to seek a perfect match for their child,

and almost without exception,

the women are described as light-skinned.

That's almost on the top line of the description,

as are the men, light-skinned.

That's the top selling point.

- You know, people, they still come,

like perspective grooms would come to a bride's home

to see the bride?

They will not even enter very much further

if the girl is dark.

So, they try to illuminate the room,

make her wear different kinds of clothes,

have her wear really thick makeup so she would look fair.

So she at least stands a chance to go to step two.

- In 2009, I conferred with the attorneys

in a case involving an Indian Asian American,

and apparently his son had married

an African American woman,

and the father did not approve of the marriage

because the woman was African American and dark complected.

So, he had his daughter-in-law murdered.

(dramatic music)

- At this time, police are still searching the area.

There seems to be...

- This has been a practice, this issue of skin color,

in some Asian countries for centuries.

It is an issue in the black community,

but because the Asian community is much more closed,

people are not aware that it exists in Asian countries.

(traditional Asian music)

- As a Japanese, we love Americans.

All the movies and stuff we watch in Japan,

there were a lot of white people back then

and still there is.

Normally the higher status people have very light skin.

They always put white powders.

It's all about the media in Japan.

It's such a small country, if we see the television,

it says, oh, this product says "beautiful white skin."

So, we were like, oh my God, we have to get it right now.

We'd go run in the store to get it.

Everybody gets the same thing.

(dramatic music)

- Skin bleaching is a growing phenomenon around the world

and it's becoming a bigger and bigger business.

It's no longer just a cream that your grandma

will make up for you out of something

that you don't know what's in it,

but now it's a multi-billion dollar business

and all the biggest cosmetic companies

sell products that are supposed to lighten your skin.

- What's also terrifying

is that we've yet to see a product

that makes you look lighter and look good and human.

And that people are willing to walk around

looking like aliens,

like some ghastly creature from a Steven Spielberg movie,

and that that is, they prefer that

over their God given color.

- You can see it's unnatural.

So, you take yourself out of the runnings

as a dark-skinned person and a light-skinned person.

When you do that, you in a different bracket.

That's something else.

That's like those little skin cats.

You ever see those cats with the skin?

Ain't no hair on 'em, just skin?

Like a Shar-Pei kitten?

That's how the woman looked.

You don't want that.

I won't even strike that as light-skinned.

That's too far.

(piano music)

- I began to believe the criticism

and I started to hate my complexion,

so what I started doing was tanning a lot.

Over the years of excessive tanning,

I developed skin damage called melasma,

which is here on my forehead.

I also have dark spots above my lips.

And as a result, I now have to use

expensive laser treatment and bleaching creams

to fade away the dark spots.

I find it ironic that now in hindsight,

trying to be accepted, to change my complexion

with excessive tanning, that I now have to

seek therapy to change the complexion of my skin.

- On a weekly basis we see patients

that are coming in that are desiring to be lighter

or have lesions potentially or dark areas

of their skin, lightened.

And in those cases, we say, "Hey, yes.

"We can help you and we will give you a lightening agent

"that will help to effect an improvement

"on your overall appearance, but we don't want you

"to use this product all over your face,

"all over your body."

- In the U.S., you will not often find creams

or products that blatantly promise

to bleach or whiten your skin.

In other parts of the world

you will find things that are called

Skin So White, White Perfect, White And Lovely,

and all kinds of other products

that are really focused on whitening

and marketed in that way.

And they are popular throughout many African countries,

the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East,

India, Philippines, Japan, broadly.

- When I was in Nigeria in the early '90s,

I was in the marketplace

and I would see women, beautiful dark-hued women,

completely attired in their with their geles

and their lappas and their boobas,

and all of this white powder all over their skin.

And I said, "Well, what is that?"

And I was told bleach.

- In the history of the world,

there wasn't a dominant race

imposing their view of beauty and their way of being

onto white people, so if white people want to be tanned,

it's not the same as dark girls wanting to be light-skinned

because this image of beauty has been propaganda

for hundreds of years.

Like, the right way to be is the Western way to be

and the Western way to be is white.

- Nigerians have a huge color complex.

Bleaching over there is actually way too common.

You know, people who were born darker than me are now

the color of a Starbucks cup.

And what usually gives 'em away is the knuckles

because for some odd reason the knuckles

don't bleach.

(chuckles)

They don't bleach that easy.

- The main ingredient that's used

in some of these skin lightening products

is Hydroquinone.

It's a carcinogenic product.

It actually causes cancer.

As a result of prolonged use,

your skin will actually begin to change.

It may actually develop a permanent discoloration

which is darker again than what you started with.

It may become leathery in appearance

and it may develop a bumpy, nodular look to it.

- These ingredients are effective

in bleaching one's melanin content out of the skin,

but because they are toxic, when these women are pregnant,

by way of the placenta, these toxic substances

enter and result in a stillbirth.

Essentially what you're saying

is it's more important for a woman

to bleach her skin or to be lighter complected

than the life of her child.

(dramatic drumbeat)

(somber piano music)

- Somewhere along the line with this country's

very difficult history around race and class and color,

emerged a beauty standard that we were not a part of.

We were not reflected in it.

But not only did that beauty standard rise,

we were taught to hate ourselves.

- The beauty business is predicated

on keeping women crazy.

Keep moving the target.

Okay, if I get here, then I'm gonna get happy.

If I get here then I'm gonna,

I'm gonna look in a way that will satisfy me

and the rest of the world.

And never being able to get to it.

- We drank the Kool-Aid that there's a standard to beauty.

The status quo of beauty.

And I think what these kids are really doing

is they've bought into this tale

and believe that unless you look a certain way,

your value is not 100%.

- Cosmetics companies

spend millions of dollars on advertising a year

to put out the newest, hottest trends.

They study them, they research them.

They look at people like Nicki Minaj,

at Rihanna, and Beyonce to what they're doing

and every month when you get your magazine in the mail,

it is being forced down your throat

to believe that this is the standard of beauty

that has been set by the world

and that you should emulate it.

- Whiteness and white beauty are very powerful sales tools.

A lot of us are seduced by the lure of white beauty

and you can sell cars and houses and retirement plans

and makeup all with white beauty and white power

and that's true globally, not just in the United States.

- We as black people have a buying power

of over a trillion dollars, and if you're not

at the table, you're on the menu.

So, we've been on the menu for so long, so they tell us

what isn't beautiful, that our features are ugly,

that everything about this beautiful black woman

that everyone rushes out, after a while,

they want the lips.

They want the behind.

They want the look, but as long as you keep telling me

that something is wrong, then I will continue,

my people, black women, they will continue

to go after that image and pay more money.

- There are certain things that one will never be.

I am a Chinese-Jamaican-Irish-French-Sc

fat homosexual.

I will never wake up tomorrow

and be a white woman.

But for the women that do read magazines,

and for the men that do read magazines,

and they believe what is on the written page,

it's very hard to live up to those standards.

(dramatic drumbeat)

(dramatic ambient music)

- [Secretary] Good, how are you?

- The question, "What is beauty?"

gets commonly asked

to me by patients, and there are textbooks

from the '50s and '60s which categorize

facial symmetry as beautiful.

- Nefertiti is an interesting person

to talk about because for many of us,

Nefertiti is really that ideal person of beauty.

And in fact, the American Society of Aesthetic,

or the ASAP Society, uses Nefertiti

as their ideal icon of beauty.

It's actually their logo.

- We're gonna be taking a photo today of your face.

Ready, one, two, three.

(camera clicks)

So, this is your face.

Different dimensions.

We can zoom in, see your pores,

see different areas of your face.

If we look at proportionally how your face is,

the height of your nose is 49 millimeters

and you have a very long lower face,

which is 63 millimeters.

So, we talked about narrowing the tip of your nose.

We talked about narrowing the width of your nose

because your nose is too wide on your face.

So, these are just a few changes,

but then now if we look at your nose,

where you started to where you're at,

there's absolutely a difference that has occurred.

A lot of women are trying to achieve

this frame to their body which, in most cases,

is not achievable.

They may bring in clippings from magazines.

Or the opposite is, they may say,

"Do what you think is beautiful,"

which is actually the worst type of patient

because my idea is different than their idea

is different than their spouse or significant other's

idea of what is beautiful.

- Many of the aesthetics ideal of beauty

is not someone who is ethnic in nature.

It tends to be someone who is a very Anglican

looking woman, which is not necessarily

what Nefertiti looked like.

- I think it's beautiful right now that

Lupita Nyong'o is having her moment

and that people are actually recognizing

how beautiful she is.

And this is

a dark-skinned sister with short, natural hair.

And that's a beautiful thing that she

is being exalted in that way.

- Oh, Lupita!

I just love her, love her.

And that's black beauty.

- [Interviewer] You think she'll have an influence

on your industry?

- She's already had influence, I think, just a bit,

but it'll be a temporary one.

It'll be temporary.

Lupita will have a temporary influence

on the industry because, again, it's a battle.

It really is a battle that people continuously

speak about this and that we see small changes

for a moment and then it stops.

- When fragrance and cosmetic companies look at her,

I don't think that it's in their motives

to say, "She's not gonna be successful."

Right?

But I do believe that they're forced to be racist,

because as much as they wanna give her what she deserves,

they're going to have to constantly prove her validity.

It's not about black and white, it's about green.

- Color is one of the biggest areas where we see it,

but it's everything.

Women are told from, my goodness,

I mean I tell you from the top,

look at me right now.

From the top of my head to the bottom

of my feet, from the second I get on set,

and I'm okay with it because I understand

the business I'm in, but literally, if I weren't.

If I didn't have my head on straight.

If I didn't have a sense of who I was,

can you imagine that every day I come in

and before I can get on camera,

I'm told there is a process you need to go through

to get visible for us.

I gotta put on somethin' to suck it in

and tighten it up, but don't flatten it, though,

'cause we wanna keep these up and out,

and we wanna keep the booty, you know,

but not too wide, but just a little wide,

just a curve there, but not a curve in the front.

So, it's not just about color,

it is about the idea period that someone is deciding

for us what is standard, accepted, pretty.

We have to really begin to recognize it

as it's developing within our household,

within our school system, within our culture, and stop it.

Stop it.

We have to stop it.

(upbeat rhythmic music)

- Honestly, everybody know light-skinned girls stand out.

You know what I'm saying?

Just in general they stand out, you know what I mean?

But I see people lookin' at light-skinned girls

as being the preference, because I put it like this.

You got a car lot of black and gray cars

and you got a red corvette, what's gonna stand out.

It's gonna be the red corvette.

(men chuckle)

- I think a preference is okay.

It's why do you have the preference?

Is this because you're trying to make yourself better

or you have a preference in a way

that is demeaning to, you know our people suffer

from that thing of the light and the dark.

I have a brother that has that issue.

He prefers light-skinned women

because he thinks that's better,

that the light-skinned is better.

- I like to think that, man,

I'm worldwide, but my fiancee is very light.

My son's mother is very light.

And, yeah, my resume got

a lot of light-skinned women.

It does.

And I don't know if I go after the light-skinned women,

but I think that's just what I like.

- To be honest, honest, I prefer dark-skinned women.

This gon' probably kill me out here, here, but

the dark-skinned women that I've dated

have been more supportive.

You know, they'll stay there.

The light-skinned chicks,

you know if I got a 214 BMW,

she lookin' for a cat with a 216.

- A lot is handed to and given to and expected

by the pretty, light-skinned women

as opposed to a dark-skinned woman.

You see a dark-skinned woman,

she's ready to get her hands dirty, and get to work.

And so, when I'm hangin' out with them

or we're doin' dinner, we're doin' the movies

or somethin' like that,

I see a light-skinned woman ain't gettin' up

to go get me no popcorn.

That ain't happenin'.

I'm like, yo, I don't wanna leave this scene,

this is crazy, go get the popcorn.

Light-skinned woman was like, "Please.

"You won't have any popcorn."

you know, the dark-skinned woman be like,

"Boo Boo, you keep watchin' this.

"I'ma go get the popcorn.

"Anything else?"

I'd be like, "Twizzlers, soda, Reese's, everything."

- It's just how it is.

The light skin is more of a trophy

and as a man you wanna have a trophy girl.

When she comes out, everybody's lookin' at you.

It's more of a prize.

With a dark-skinned girl, I'm not sayin'

you can't get that same prize, but,

they gotta go through more.

They have to have other features.

Once you light-skinned, you can really get away

with a lot of things, so.

People tend to look at a trophy,

even you see a regular trophy,

when you look at a trophy it's light.

(men laugh)

- I have some black male friends

that just like white girls, period.

That's just, you know.

And it's not even about black color, per se,

it's the black attitude.

It's like they don't wanna deal with,

Where you goin'?

Where you been?

Da da da da da.

Unh-unh, nuh-unh, unh-unh.

You don't get the unh-unh, unh-unhs from white girls

'cause they wasn't raised that way.

And that's usually why when I ask one of my friends,

like, "What, you don't like black girls at all?"

"I'm not tryin' to deal with that attitude."

- It's not about this superficial covering

of am I light-skinned, am I dark-skinned,

or what it may be, it's about the person inside.

Who is she?

And that's what I look at.

- How can we grow together?

- Exactly.

- Like, are we

into the same thing? Are we interested in the same thing?

- Does she push me to be better?

- Absolutely.

- I think it's maturity.

- Absolutely.

- I think what it comes

down to is being secure in yourself

and being mature enough to say

it doesn't matter what she looks like.

- We live in a human and a global community.

So, you meet people who are light-skinned,

you meet white, you meet Asian, you meet black,

and I feel that if your heart resonates,

and the people that your heart resonates with

might not actually be the same skin as you are.

They might be another race, another skin, you know.

And I feel that in that sense, for me,

there is no, I'm not limited as to the people

that I gravitate towards or the people

that I'm attracted to.

I feel this all over all other races, you know.

(rhythmic hip-hop music)

- Light-skinned girls,

they're easier to be accepted in society.

They could walk out on the street

and they could get a guy in no time because of light skin.

Dark skin girls, they should be able to get guys, too,

but for some reason they will take more from you

as a dark skin woman than a light skin woman.

- Successful black men choose

what they consider to be a trophy woman

if she's light bright.

They may want the booty.

They may want the lips, the curves, the features,

but can she be a little bit lighter?

Because subconsciously I think it comes from us

not even loving, not only ourselves,

but we don't want a woman that society

doesn't consider beautiful.

- It is true, at least anecdotally,

that we do find that many athletes,

folks that have access to power, politicians, entertainers,

seem to have either non-black or lighter skinned wives.

And part of that is because in our society

clearly the media portrays

lighter skinned as more beautiful.

- I guess we're doing better,

because it used to the be the trophy was a white woman.

Now, we're getting a little darker,

so I guess we have progressed.

We've gone from white to sort of a cream.

Since they hold that model as attractive

and if he's usually a little bit unattractive,

him being with her makes him look different.

He has a different status now.

He's just not the little rich ugly dude.

He's the rich ugly dude with the fine ass girl,

which kinda now makes him better lookin'.

See, I never had that problem 'cause

I was always good lookin'.

It's the girl that's gettin' all the accolades.

Like, how'd she get him?

- I think when you're a young girl,

to hear that she isn't enough,

that starts to spiral, that as she becomes a woman,

she'll never be enough.

And it's hard then as a man

to be able to talk to the woman

who springs from that little girl

and tell her that she's beautiful,

because as a guy either you're judging your scale

of what beauty is on this false version

that's been fed to you, or if you want something

more authentic to you and you try to tell that woman that,

no, you are absolutely beautiful,

she will not believe you.

(soft ambient music)

- I think that there is a consciousness

that sees the light girls

as a trophy aspect.

I don't have to go all the way white

(laughs)

I can go light, you know?

- A man always want a light-skinned woman on his team.

(laughs) It's just the way it is.

'Cause they thinkin' about they children

and what they gon' come out, and what they gonna look like.

Me growin' up, though, a lot of my girlfriends were dark.

But when we would go out, I would always

get the guys first and then they would

get the rest of 'em on the trickle down.

It might not have been a light skin, dark skin thing.

It might've been who was puttin' out more.

(laughs)

- I do have a lot of, specifically white men

will approach me and think that I'm a lot more,

a lot easier to deal with because of the way

that I look, and then when they hear me talk,

they're like, oh hell, let me get away from this one.

This one looks like Marilyn McCoo on the outside

but she's Florida Evans on the inside.

(laughs)

- I don't think I could even categorize.

You know you could put any of my former girlfriends,

relationships in a line and I guess

I could line 'em up as, okay,

who's lighter and who's darker,

but if I had to think back and say,

well, was this person light-skinned

or was this person dark, I don't even think I've got

that recorded in my head.

There are one or two of 'em it's quite obvious, yeah.

I was thinking, are you light-skinned

or dark-skinned or medium?

I don't know.

It just doesn't register.

- No.

That's because you're not African America.

- I'm not what?

- African American.

- That's true, I'm not.

- I wouldn't personally date somebody

if he says all I date is light-skinned women

or white women.

- But it goes the other way for a darker skinned woman, too,

because you have, we were talkin' about this earlier,

you have the men who will only date darker women.

Just like, oh, I can't date this woman...

- The black revolutionary type.

- Right.

(women laugh)

- I don't think it's a bad thing.

I don't think that's a bad thing.

I think they're comfortable with themselves.

- But I'm sayin', like...

- You're still doing the exact same thing.

That's just you being you.

- [Woman] The point is once you say, like,

this is all I do, then you're fetishizing.

- Right, exactly.

- [Woman] Fetishizing.

- I definitely feel I've gotten some preferential treatment

form black men being light-skinned.

I often hear comments about, you know,

nothin' nowhere near as dark as me.

I don't like dark-skinned girls.

I've gotten in arguments with black men about it,

even though I don't fall under what they're talking about,

I feel defensive over my darker skinned sisters.

- They're assumption when they meet me

is that my whole family is light-skinned.

And then they see my sister

and they would say, "You have dark-skinned people

"in your family."

Yes, yes I do.

(chuckles)

And how disinterested they then become.

It's painful to find that there are some men

who want to date my complexion and not date me.

- There was a fantasy about light-skinned women

which affected me very negatively.

I couldn't walk down the street

without a man saying something,

feeling that he had the right to approach me

or physically handle me.

It got to the point where if I saw a man

walking down the street, I'd have to cross the street.

- I was walking down the street by myself

on my cell phone and I didn't even hear a guy,

but apparently some guys in a car

were driving by and they were trying

to get my attention but I didn't hear them

because I was talking on the phone,

and out of nowhere a beer gets thrown at me.

(glass breaking)

(tires screeching)

And they yell, "You pale bitch."

They were all black, of course,

and it was a man that was carrying

that much anger about a complexion

I didn't ask to be born with.

- The way men approach women,

I've met my slaves in my day, I will tell you.

And I'm not fluent in slave,

so when a man comes to me and says,

oh, you got that pretty hair.

You know, you look like you mixed.

I would never have a conversation

with somebody like that.

I think that's just, I move on from that,

because that let's me know where your mentality is.

- I remember my mother saying,

"The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice,"

and I would go, "Eww.

"What do you mean by that?

"I don't know."

Because I grew up likin' the Pretty Boy Floyds.

You know what I mean? The light skin, the guy that's

in the mirror with me with his curly hair

and we like, oh, can I borrow your curling iron

or whatever, ya know?

And now, it's true.

The darker the berry the sweeter the juice.

(laughs)

- If I were to tell the whole complete truth,

I grew in the era when the light man

with the good hair was a trophy man.

I wanted one of them because I wanted

to have good, nice looking kids.

Pretty babies as I was trained.

But it was also very clear to me

that no man wealthy, no man handsome,

no man well-educated would want me.

He wouldn't want me because I was not a trophy.

(static buzzing)

(glass breaking)

- One thing that's really struck me about mass media

in the last 30 to 40 years is that it's been able

to sort of undermine the black consciousness movement.

In the '60s and '70s we were all wearing afros.

I think part of what killed that

is the fact that you don't wear an afro in the mass media,

so it took back that pride that we were developing

in terms of who we are naturally.

- When images of whiteness are the standard of beauty

and that's what we all see, I mean,

globally at this point, not even just,

you know, in the United States,

when we're seeing certain images as being held up

and certain images that are just completely omitted,

we all are impacted by that.

We all kinda drink that Kool-Aid.

- What we're starting to see when it comes

to advertisers and brands,

I think what they historically have done

is they've chosen a lighter cast.

It's well documented in terms of how lighter

or fairer skinned talent typically gets cast more

because it becomes more about things are comfortable.

- Now, what we've seen over the last 24 months,

we see this whole phenomena of biracial

becoming the safer ground.

- Growing up I didn't like the person I was

or my skin complexion because I didn't see anyone

in the media look like me until Scary Spice

from Spice Girls came out,

and I was like, wow, there is someone who is

of light-skinned complexion with big curly hair

that embraces who she is.

And I really valued that I liked that.

- You can look at the names of actresses that are bigger

and see how they're pushed forward.

You look at the Halle Berrys,

you even look at my wife, Salli Richardson-Whitfield,

and you see that that particular shade

seems to be the gold standard in terms of our women.

- When I was thinking about making movies

the music video industry was huge and all you really saw

were light-skinned women with long hair.

I never wanted to have that portrayal in my films.

It's like, the one that's desirable

is the light-skinned girl.

- It started to be, well, if I'm really gonna look

like these dreams I'm sellin',

not to get the black girl that look like

the girl around the street,

but what about the Brazilian girl?

What about the Latino girl?

You're not supposed to be able to access those

from your hood.

So, if you do have them in your videos

sittin' on your cars and they're lookin' like

they're from Miami or Puerto Rico or wherever,

that makes you shine even more as the black artist,

the rap artist that you are because it makes it

look like you reached outside of your realm,

you've made it.

- I believe one artist even had a casting call

for light-skinned women.

I've seen things like that.

Not that it hasn't been criticized and the culture

hasn't, there haven't been a lot of activists

who have come out and spoken against that, but it exists.

It was there.

- I see a lot lighter women deal with colorism,

especially in our industry because they'll have an audition,

and then they don't get the part

and it's a lot of times, whether it is or not I'm not sure,

but they'll say, "I didn't get it because

"they wanted to go with someone who looked blacker."

Which is funny, it's the reverse

with the dark-skinned woman.

They think they're lips were too full

and their hair was too coarse to get the part, so.

- When I had my own show I used to tan

three or four times a week in a tanning bed

to get darker.

I did.

And it's funny, one of the lighting guys came up,

I love him to death,

I love him, oh my goodness.

He goes, "Raven, I need you to stop tanning.

"You're getting too dark and we have to relight

"the whole entire show."

I was like, "Sorry, I was just tryin' to be pretty."

- Producing primetime television

a lot of times we might be in1 a situation

where we wanna make sure we cast a dark-skinned girl,

so we're passing up the light-skinned sisters

because we don't wanna be accused of doing that.

And so here you might have a very talented actress

who's being overlooked because of her complexion.

- I remember going in for this one production.

It was "Akeelah and the Bee"

and I wanted to play the daughter to Angela Bassett

and the sister to Keke Palmer,

so I was lookin' at their complexion

because all this time, people,

my agents, my managers, people in the industry,

"Oh you're a light skin," and then they would compare you.

Oh, light skin like Halle Berry,

but it's a curse, struggle, and it's hard.

So, that's just in your head when you're auditioning.

It shouldn't be, but it was such a focus for me

that I tanned myself.

- I think my skin color has been an advantage

in the workplace for sure.

I think if you look at, maybe less now,

but certainly when I was starting to work on camera,

most of the black women looked like me.

We could've all been sisters.

Light-skinned women with straightened hair

and a certain bob cut.

And I think that's changed a little bit

over the last maybe 10 years, but not that much.

- In my community, I might be perceived

as someone who has a leg up because of the color of my skin.

In the big community

where everything that really matters,

I'm not considered a leg up.

We all know that human beings respond

to something that is lighter.

White people respond primarily to blondes

with white skin, but so does everybody else.

Being black is something that one has to deal with

and of course the shade of black is going

to be absolutely a part of it.

- I'm in a strange place.

I do a lot of films where,

I'm in a lot of white TV shows and

for some reason because of that

I'm not really acknowledged in the black community,

and I see that with a lot of actors.

Now, if I was doing a show on BET

or if I did more black films, then...

(hands clapping)

- When I've had beautiful little brown-skinned girls

look at me and say that they wish that they looked like

Miley Cyrus, or little black boys who wanted

to look like Justin Bieber.

It's a sickness.

- I was just on Instagram yesterday

and just kind of was searching team light skin,

team dark skin, and there were

so many people that were using those hashtags.

It was actually like 375,000 plus

using team light skinned versus, like,

350,000 plus using team dark skin.

- [Radio Announcer] L.A. NAACP honored...

- Even on our morning show, you know,

Charlamagne is dark-skinned and DJ Envy

is light-skinned and they go through that.

Charlamagne's always telling Envy,

"You act so light-skinned."

'Cause acting light-skinned for a guy means

that you're emotional like Drake or something.

(laughs)

And you just get all in your feelings all the time

and people like Charlamagne would tell him

all the time, oh, now you actin' like a light-skinned guy

and you're makin' the light-skinned guys look bad.

It's kinda like they pit you against each other.

And I understand it's a joke,

but some people really think that way.

(soft piano music)

- You know the scary thing about younger users

of social media and even technology

is that it opens up a whole new world

that their parents can't control.

I have a nephew that's actually just turned two

and he knows how to use the iPhone.

He knows how to unlock the phone,

he knows how to go onto the internet,

and that's terrifying because if you look

at all the stuff that's going on

on social media right now, you have bullying,

you have, just, so much bad things

it almost seems to outweigh the good.

It's kinda scary to know that children

younger and younger are having access to that world.

(calm music)

- There continues to be a schism

between light girls and dark girls

because there hasn't been a clean, clear,

complete conversation.

- We have to be revolutionaries.

We have to love like revolutionaries.

You know, that idea that I was telling you about,

you know, my grandmother's generation was about life,

my mother's generation was about liberties,

civil rights, liberties.

Ours is the pursuit of happiness

and we have to pursue it with the spirit of a revolutionary.

And we can not be happy if we are at war with each other.

We can not be happy if we are at war with our very skin.

- If we are to have some healing,

we have to embrace our role in it.

Not just what they did to us, but what now

we do to us.

- Nobody's gonna heal us.

We have to heal ourselves.

We've got to deconstruct this problem

and find out what's going on, because the world

is not gonna stop perpetrating this lie.

It's to their advantage.

- We must save ourselves.

Hurt people hurt people and black people are hurting.

And I think that we as a people

must stop pointing fingers.

We have to no longer blame the system,

the media, the white man or the white woman,

end embrace one another out of love.

Light-skinned sisters and dark-skinned sisters,

I think they have to join each other

in a sistership and leave bullship at home.

- You know, when someone says, you know, I just feel,

I'll give speeches.

People stand up, "I just wanna say

"I just feel like one day I don't even see color

"and one day we're just gonna be in a place where

"no one sees color."

I think that's stupid.

I do see color.

Black people are black people.

Latinos, Asians.

Seeing color is not inherently bad.

I think seeing a problem when you see color

is inherently bad, but there's no problem

in seeing color.

People are different.

They have great stories about where their people

have come from, which, as a journalist,

I find incredibly interesting.

- It's a challenge.

It really is a challenge and my light-skinned brothers,

they talk about, well, light used to be in

but it's comin' back.

Why do we measure ourselves by the color

of our skin instead of, as Martin Luther King says,

the content of our character?

- People can do better when they know better,

but when they don't know better,

it's crazy for us to expect them to do better,

and even crazier for us to expect other people to teach us.

And so I think that that's an area

that we have to address inside the church,

how we view one another and what we value.

- We're not in a post-racial society.

We're in a society that continues

to use any facet

of whatever exists socially, politically,

and economically to create leverage for groups of people.

And I don't want my daughter and our children,

both in black America, white America,

and every other part of America and the world

to think that because of their color,

they have some decided advantage.

That really would be a tragedy.

(somber music)

- So, as a physicist,

there's two ways to think about this.

The first is that we're all made up

of the same bits and pieces that were made

in these mind boggling episodes in the universe.

And so, at some level, these distinctions

are very small sort of perturbations

if you try to start thinking about the really big picture

of the universe and where we are in it.

But I guess maybe it's something to do with human nature

that we really like to categorize things.

And sometimes when we categorize things,

it helps us understand the world around us

and sometimes it actually gets in the way

of us seeing the deeper truth.

- We are the same and we are connected.

We are 99.9999, we are the same, we're all,

so I believe one living, breathing God

and we're all cells, all connected.

If God were the ocean, we'd be cups of God.

I think that we are all one.

- Healing happens when we realize that we are all equal.

So, we tap into the brain on the cellular level.

When we start to do this, the experience alone

of treating all the same, will alter

the neuronal pathways in the brain.

I know this is hard for people to believe, but it's true.

You ever had any good news before?

You were havin' a really bad day,

all of a sudden you got some great news

and it changed your entire mood?

Do you realize what happened to you?

That good news went into your brain,

traveled to your neurotransmitter dopamine

and the good news alone lifted your mood.

We need to infuse this kind of dopamine

into our children.

Not just the dark-skinned kids,

but the light-skinned kids as well,

so that they're taken off the hook.

- If you wake up every morning

and you tell yourself that you are beautiful

whether you feel it or not,

eventually you will start believing it.

So, if you walk into a room and you're like,

I'm beautiful, I am me, there's no one else like me,

I am original, people will feed off of that

and they would automatically stop and looK

and be like, who's that girl?

- I don't think you have to live with anything forever.

I think colorism can be healed, but it has to,

it has to start in the home.

- It's gonna take for us to be a role model.

A lot of people don't wanna be a role model.

I'm not that.

I wanna live my life.

But the truth of the matter is you're a role model

when you're an auntie.

You're a role model when you're a grandmother.

You're a role model when you're a big cousin

because you have to stand for something

because everybody is lookin' at you

when you're the elder.

When you're the oldest one, you're leading by example,

so you gotta be able to stand for something.

- I love my people.

I love all the shades.

God made me this way so I have to be happy

with who I am, and it's a journey,

and I embrace my brown-skinned sisters.

I love them

and I hope that they embrace me.

And I want my brown-skinned sisters

to stop lookin' at the light-skinned sisters

and like, mm, she think she cute.

No she doesn't.

I heard that with my girlfriend, "She think she cute."

'Cause she swung her hair?

It was in her face.

Or the way she walks?

She doesn't think she cute, she's confident.

But I bet you that same sister's

at home cryin' on the floor 'cause we got the same issues.

- Whether light, whether dark, whether mixed, whether,

there's only one of you.

Don't waste your time thinkin' that you're not good enough.

Don't waste your time

thinkin' that you're ugly.

Don't waste your time because somebody else

is thinkin' the same thing.

So, if you're thinkin' you're beautiful,

then you can pass it off to somebody else.

- I say consistently that the highest religion

on the planet is truth, and most of us don't live

in truth when we're looking at the aesthetics of ourselves.

And we look in the mirror, we have not learned

how to love ourselves.

And in us

not being able to love ourselves,

we're gonna lack that self-esteem,

we're gonna lack that self-confidence,

and that's gonna be a human plight until the end of time.

- I think the bottom line of everything,

even when we talk about healing this colorism issue

in the world, that it starts with healing yourself,

'cause really, you're the only person you can control.

And so, work on yourself and treat yourself,

talk to yourself the way you would talk

to somebody who you're trying to heal.

- Pretty is as pretty does.

If you act nice, then that means you are pretty,

but if you act mean, that means you're ugly.

- You should be glad that you are who you are

because God is never wrong and makes you how you are

and you should never doubt that.

- There's a passage in the Bible that says,

"My people perish for lack of knowledge."

If we don't know who we are,

then we're gonna get turned away in every direction

based on lack of information, when in reality,

you know, we are the first people.

How can we hate who we are?

- [Woman] Go run.

Who's gonna get it?

- I got it!

- Our youth is our future,

and they're our generation to come.

They're our next presidents, our next firefighters,

police officers, lawyers, entrepreneurs.

So, we want to ensure that our youth understand

the sense of community an the importance of community

and that loving and embracing everyone for who they are,

whether they're dark-skinned, light-skinned,

pink, purple, Asian,

olive, any complexion or any kind of

physical attribute, that they're able

to just appreciate a person for who they are.

- Until we become willing to have

a clear, clean, complete conversation

in the kitchen, at the workplace, in the boardroom,

at the church, at the social club,

a clear, clean, complete conversation

where we have the opportunity to hear and embrace

and acknowledge one another's experience,

I can't be mad at light girls because of my experience

as a dark girl.

I have to learn how to understand and recognize

her experience may have been different,

but in the end we all black.

We're people of color.

(piano music) (birds chirping)

♪ This little light of mine ♪

♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪

♪ This little light of mine ♪

♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪

♪ This little light of mine ♪

♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪

♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪

(acoustic guitar music)

- I got my new guitar in the house.

♪ I am light, I am light ♪

♪ I am light, I am light ♪

♪ I am light, I am light ♪

♪ I am light ♪

(chuckling)

♪ I am not the things my family did ♪

♪ I am not the voices in my head ♪

♪ I am not the pieces of the brokenness inside ♪

♪ I am light ♪

♪ I'm not the mistakes that I have made ♪

♪ Or any other things that cause me pain ♪

♪ I am not the pieces of the dream I left behind ♪

♪ I am light ♪

(dramatic music)