Colorism
Colorism is prejudice or unequal treatment based on skin tone, often privileging lighter skin over darker skin within the same racial or ethnic group.
Skin tone stratification: The ranking of people by skin shade, often linked to unequal social status and opportunity. Colorism operates through hierarchies that attach social value to lighter or darker skin.
European colonialism: The expansion of European political control and settlement across the world, especially from the fifteenth century onward. Colonial regimes often associated lighter skin with authority, status, and access.
Employment discrimination: Unequal treatment in hiring, pay, promotion, or working conditions based on protected or socially salient traits. Studies find that complexion can influence hiring and workplace evaluation within racial groups.
Racism: A system of beliefs, practices, and institutions that assigns racial groups unequal status and treatment. Colorism can operate within racism, but distinguishes people by complexion as well as racial category.
Black is beautiful: A cultural movement affirming Black beauty, identity, and pride, prominent in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The movement directly challenged standards that treated lighter skin and European features as superior.
Implicit bias: Automatic associations and evaluations that influence judgment, often without conscious awareness. Unconscious associations can translate skin-tone preferences into everyday decisions.
Atlantic slave trade: The forced transport of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for enslavement from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Enslavement produced hierarchies in which complexion could affect labor, treatment, and social position.
Educational inequality: Unequal access to educational resources, opportunities, and outcomes across social groups. Skin-tone bias can affect discipline, expectations, and opportunities in educational settings.
Shadeism: Bias or discrimination based on skin shade, especially within a racial or ethnic group. Shadeism is often used as a near-synonym for colorism, with emphasis on shade-based distinctions.
Négritude: A literary and political movement affirming Black identity and culture, developed by Francophone writers in the 1930s. Its rejection of colonial values informs resistance to hierarchies that devalue darker skin.