Last night after watching the Tyra show with my wife (something we have not done in months), we got into an interesting conversation about acceptance levels based on skin tones. You see, Tyra’s show was about the expectancies men have of women based on their ethnicities. Sounds very trivial, but it was an interesting way to end a Monday night.
My question to my wife was this–
“If Beyonce was dark-skinned, do you believe she would be just as popular?”
Her response was a flat out “no”. I agree.
I then reminded her about Diana Ross who was very appealing to both White and Black men–especially during the days of disco.
My wife felt that what helped Diana was the fact that A. She was not as dark as other sistahs out there and B. She rocked a long flowing weave during a time when long hair like that was mainly seen on White women. I think I can also add that C. Her style of music had cross-over appeal and D. Facial features.
Point “A” is the only one I did not totally agree with 
.
Another thing we talked about was how light-skinned sistahs (Rihanna, Keyshia Cole, Ciara, Beyonce, Alicia Keys, etc.) these days do enjoy more cross-over appeal than many of our darker skinned sistahs (Jill Scott, Angie Stone, Leela James, India.Arie, etc.). Neo-soul seems to be the spot these days if you can sang yo’ butt off, but have a darker skin tone and maybe a little bit overweight while lanes are pretty open for skinny light-skinned women (green eyes are a plus).
I also wondered if it was just a mere coincidence that most popular rappers tend to be darker-skinned.
Anyway, there is a whole lot of directions I could go with this, but I think I will leave this one to you to draw up some conclusions.
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November 27th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
I agree with A – D. A lot of marketing ppl pay attention to the preferences of a demographic that they’re focusing on. & I still believe that Black ppl latch on to Euro standards of beauty. We’re very much color-struck as a people as we are also racially obsessed as a society.
I think we as Black ppl need to be more honest about how many of us have limited scopes of beauty. Beauty is subjective. Yes, I understand. But scrutinizing the hell out of someone because of skin color and facial features is ridiculous.
We’re very quick to cry “racism” when White people put down our physical attributes. Yet we’re hesitant to address another Black person who isn’t doing anything short of his/her White counterpart.