![]() There was a slight troubling when I would watch TV shows such as Martin or movies like Coming to America, and the love interest was always light and the girls my color were shrews – too fast, too forward, too sarcastic to be loved. ![]() It seemed quaint, like pin curls or cellophane. Colorism – the prejudice based on skin tone, usually with a marked preference for lighter-skinned people – was something I read about in novels. ![]() Growing up in the supportive environment my mother created for us, I assumed into early adulthood that colorism was a thing of the past. I haven’t seen it since my grandmother died. My mother hated that picture, the erasure of her blackness. “He thought she was Italian,” I remember my grandmother telling me, as explanation. The painter had lightened my mother’s skin to an anemic grayish yellow, given her green eyes, and thinned her nose. In my grandmother’s house, my mother’s high school portrait sat on the mantle – it was a photograph retouched with oil. Looking back, I think this probably had to do with her own skin color – my mother was much lighter than my grandmother, with a spray of freckles across her nose.
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