When I first watched the movie “Precious,” I loved it. I thought its depiction of an obese black woman struggling with incestuous rape and illiteracy was vivid, and I thought it touched on so many issues that it was great for our society to see this movie. The actors earned several Oscar nods, and the movie received great reviews all over.
At first, I totally agreed with the millions of people who loved this movie. The second time I watched it, however, it disgusted me. A movie I thought was a powerful narrative that we all needed to see quickly turned into another indirect perpetrator of what I like to call the “light-skinned vs. dark-skinned rule” — the rule that dark-skinned African-Americans are somehow inferior to lighter-skinned blacks.
In “Precious,” her abusive, incestuous mother is dark-skinned, her rapist father is dark-skinned, and her illiterate self is dark-skinned. In contrast, the boy she fantasizes about, the caseworker who gets her out of her troubled home, the teacher who teaches her how to read and even the charming male nurse who cares for her in the hospital are all fair-skinned. This implies that dark-skinned African-Americans are more sexually ruthless, physically violent and less educated than light-skinned African-Americans.
If you think that this was just a coincidence and that the makers of “Precious” just so happened to put the characters in this order, think again. Every single nook and cranny of a movie is well-planned, and casting is a very particular process. Do you think that an Academy Award-winning movie with a $10 million budget would skim over any detail? Absolutely not.
These sorts of injustices have been around for as long as black people have been in America. During slavery, the lighter-skinned slaves were treated much better than the dark-skinned ones because they were usually the children of the slave master. They ate better, were more likely to learn to read and write, and usually served as the house slaves. Dark-skinned slaves were more likely to be left in the field to do the hard work under the sun.
This discrepancy lead to a growing distrust between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks. Today, social constructs are just as interested in maintaining this distrust as they were in the past. Light-skinned males are more likely to get jobs than dark men, light-skinned children are seen as less devious than dark-skinned children, and dark women are seen as less attractive than their fair-skinned counterparts. Not only does this harm the confidence of dark people, but it also confuses light-skinned and mixed blacks who are finding their place within the African-American narrative and it establishes internal enemies within the African-American community.
Black women are probably most familiar with these forces. Because lightness is associated with beauty, dark women often feel pressure to seem lighter or to posses European traits to get more attention from men. Conversely, because authentic blackness is associated with dark skin and natural hair, light women are pressed to make up for their lightness by asserting their authenticity. All black women lose in this situation — the darker woman has to fight to assert her beauty, and the light-skinned woman has to fight to assert her blackness.
The media do a great job of ensuring that black women have a hard time fully embracing themselves. People Magazine’s list of most beautiful people almost never includes dark-skinned women. The 2010 list only included one dark woman: the obese star from “Precious,” Gabourey Sidibe. While it seems like just another cheap public relations move to make it look like they actually care for inner beauty, it became clear that something was wrong when every other person on that list was fair skinned and slim.
It’s like they were saying there aren’t any beautiful dark people in Hollywood capable of fitting the same standards of a fair-skinned celebrity.
Beautiful dark women like Gabrielle Union, Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon and Naomi Campbell didn’t make the cut, but the obese dark woman who’s only been in one movie gets the nod?
The enforcement of color hierarchy on black America dampens black unity and throws yet another divider into an already stratified culture. Our social construct tricks us into believing the shade of our skin is a measurement of black validity and that the lighter we are, the better.
This is why I cringe when I watch “Precious.” It looks like you’re being empowered and taught a lesson, but really you’re just watching them maintain the barrier that sits been between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans.
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