The Skin She’s In: A Black Dad Ponders Colorism’s Effect On His Light-Skinned Daughter

I love my daughter in ways I could never imagine and she’s long crossed the threshold of innocent infancy. She’s at that cute stage, that small stumbling stage, that stage where I think she’ll always be a baby and every year she turns two. I see her growing, developing her personality, getting ready to start school, and I find myself future-tripping more and more. I overthink everything, and it affects how I interact with my daughter. I understand she’ll go through phases, but while I’m in this unnecessarily panicked headspace, this fact is often forgotten, and I have an urgency to over-inform and arm her against everything… now. My most recent paranoia is steeped in the foggy cultural conversation about colorism.

My daughter is a petite belle with long curly hair like a vineyard and café con leche-colored skin. She’s a shade darker than I am, and I remember growing up a mixed baby and grappling with the issues I had with race, culture, perception, and identity. The fact that she’s a young Black girl, and witnessing the intense disease of colorism in relation to young Black girls, paralyzes me with fear. It’s something I was thinking about even before she was born, before we had agreed on a name for her. I’ve been focused on keeping the spirit of Black culture, history, and pride prevalent within our home. She has Cornrows, by Camille Yarborough, Afrocentric alphabet books, and dolls. It’s not that I’m against melanin-deficient dolls, but I believe there is so much outside affirming a Eurocentric standard of beauty and telling our colorful children what beauty is; I want to make sure everything she plays with has a Black representation, especially her dolls. #allblackeverything

Dolls might be what I monitor the most. With every doll purchase and doll gift, I revisit the Clark doll experiment of 1939—the infamous experiment where Black children chose white dolls over Black dolls. The experiment made obvious the depth of the psychological identity complexes Black people were faced with then, and when I look at TV media and social media, it feels like, horribly, these complexes still exist. The fights on Twitter about light skin vs. dark skin disgust me, but nothing has disturbed me more on a spiritual and emotional level than when I saw two chocolate-skinned girls in absolute awe and admiration of my children. The first thing they said to me was: “Are they mixed?” “They have nice hair.” They sounded as if my children were lucky. Like they, themselves, were unfortunate.

The thing I have to remember, and the thing my wife helps remind me of, is that my daughter is, in fact, our beautifully light brown baby. I want my daughter to be a proud girl and to carry that pride securely in her spirit. But as I want her to avoid one complex, I can’t give her another. I can’t have her so Black that she holds her dark brothers and sisters on a pedestal and subsequently views herself as inherently less than. Not my proudest moment, but I’ve actually argued with my daughter over an Ethiopian doll I wanted to buy her. Through all of this, I’ve forgotten the fact that even though I don’t want her with too many white dolls because they don’t look like her, the dark-skinned dolls don’t look like her either. I don’t want to forget or have her deny her own personal beauty. I’ve also somehow forgotten that her daddy is pale nine months out of the year and that sometimes she associates those light dolls with me.

Lastly, I can’t forget the lesson that we really want to teach our children, and that’s that we all have interesting histories and that we are a Pantone of beautiful shades and I can’t let my need to instill such a strong sense of blackness make her separate herself, thus denying her a higher expression of humanity. I just want my daughter to be proud, confident in her own skin, and have a sense of self-worth and love that transcends shade because, after all, wasn’t that what the “Black is Beautiful’ movement was all about?