“If you take a look at some of our celebrities — let’s take the sports world for a moment — and look at some of the choices these gentlemen have made in terms of their girlfriends and mates, I think one would be hard-pressed to find a woman of dark complexion,” says Berry. “I think they buy into [the idea that] once you have the money, you get a status symbol. And she doesn’t look like your mother.”
Duke thinks it is of “enormous importance” that Michelle Obama, the wife of the world’s most powerful man, is dark-skinned. “I don’t think he’d be president of the US if [Michelle] was a light-skinned black woman,” he says. “There are a lot of black women who would not have voted for him because the implication would’ve been that women of a dark hue are not acceptable to him, so why does he deserve their vote? We don’t talk about it very much but it runs very, very deep. You’re expected, if you’re a successful man, to have a light-skinned trophy on your arm. With a dark woman on your arm, it means, for whatever reason, and this sounds horrible, you had to settle. I mean, this thing of color in our culture is deep.”
Mirza points to the commercialization of “darkness.” “Now, being dark can be appropriated and turned in on itself and turned into a ‘style.’ Consumption and commercialization have come in — it sells records, cosmetics, and has become a vehicle for capitalism. But it is still entrenched in racist meaning. Nowadays it may be less about social mobility and more about desirability.” Pigmentocracy still exists, she says, only the forms of mobility have changed. “It’s about celebrity now, being famous and beautiful and how that’s defined is to be thin and white, and fair and black. People are caught up in it 100 percent. They used to call it false consciousness. You could call it that, but in a sense, it’s about presentation and identity. How you see yourself is through representation — how the world represents you. You want what you are shown, what is presented and promoted as privileged.”
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