Yellow-Bone of Contention

I got my first Barbie Doll when I was ten. She had long,black hair and Almond eyes. I called her Aaliyah. Aaliyah wasn't fancy; she didn't come with a change of clothes like Beverley Hills Barbie, nor could she swim like Mermaid Barbie, but I loved her none the less; and unlike all my other friends dolls, Aaliyah looked like me. She was the same tone as me, and not 'skin-colour' like my classmates; or my favourite pencil at school. I carried her with me everywhere I went. I snuck her into my schoolbag the second my mom wasn't looking, hid her in my pockets on the way to Sunday School. I had to wangle as much quality time as I could to make up for the years of throwing myself on Reggies Store floors to no avail. Years later, I found out that the reason it took my parents so long to buy me my Barbie, is not because they're cheap bastards(I honestly believed this for five years of my life); its because they were waiting for the black Barbie to become available in South Africa. Of course , my ten year old mind didn't know it then, but my parents were doing me a huge favour. That simple act saved me from years of self-conscious mirror glares, and rands and rands spent on skin-lightening creams trying to look like Malibu Barbie.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not calling Barbie evil. I'm merely trying to paint a picture of the type of home I grew up. I was read excerpts from poets like Koerapetse Kgosistsile and Ingoapele Madingoane as bedtime stories, and my dad sang me Prince's 'Most Beautiful Girl' every night. I was a princess. I was perfect, so I was very surprised, a few years later, to find out that yes ,I was pretty but 'for a dark-skinned girl'. Idark dindi. Every compliment I got from well-meaning relatives was centered around how cute I was given my hue. I then went to an all girls school, where, to some extent I was sheltered from the way the that the world viewed me and how I looked. It was only in my later years that I realised that the way I looked(dark-skinned and dread locked) made me a niche attraction. A fetish if you will. Songs on the radio celebrated my 'brown skin' as if it was an anomaly to be brown-skinned and beautiful. Or perhaps with the advent of society popularising the Yellow-bones and the light-skinned girls, songs that celebrated dark skin and unstraightened hair were supposed to be a single fist raised in the air.

When I sat down in preparation to write this piece, I was convinced that the notion that world favours light-skinned black people was an urban legend constructed by darker skinned blacks; but when i typed 'light skin' into my google search bar, the first few responses I got were adverts for 'very effective, skin lightening creams with quick results'. A 2006 University of Georgia study found that, ceteris paribus,light-skinned blacks were more likely to get hired for jobs over dark-skinned blacks. I took to trying to find out why this preference exists, or colourism or pigmentocracy as its called.

According to University of Washington sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe in a foreword of Peter Frost's 2005 Fair Women, Dark Men, in most cultures; women are indifferent the skin colour of men but men prefer their women lighter. Consequentially, the more successful men(who have their pick of women) will go the for the yellow-bones first thus resulting in a lighter skin upper-class(the more successful, the more attractive) , and this serves to further perpetuate the cycle.

In America, the abolishment of slavery gave rise to societies such as "The Blue Vein Society" whose pre-requisite for being eligible to join was that one had to be light enough that the blue veins on the underside of the arm were visible. Members also had to be of some affluence and the aim of such societies was to encourage co-mingling and inter-breeding of members to grow this elite section of society. They were also favoured in their surrounding environment because they 'looked less like slaves'.
 Brazil, which has the largest amount of African descendants living outside Africa, also discriminates against darker-skinned Blacks for the same reason.
In the Arab , the word akhdar which was once used to describe people of questionable nobility is now a polite tern to refer to darker-skinned Arabs.
There is also a school of thought that believes that skin colour plays a huge role in the Hindi caste system. It is generally believed that the lighter ,the higher your caste(social standing) is. To this day the untouchable caste(who seen as polluted) are darker skinned Indians.

It is however, very difficult to believe that my sixteen year-old brother's fondness for light-skinned women, is a  result of colonial condition . He can barely comprehend what Apartheid was; and every guy I asked (with the exception of one) said that the colour of a woman's skin was of no relevance to them. According to the aforementioned studies, I might struggle to find a job and an affluent husband, but at least I wont have a shortage of potential one-night stands and flings.
I'm not bitter though, some of my best friends are light.