Colorism In Latinx Communities
The Lumen Blog
2015-07-16
Yesenia Padilla
San Diego, California
A few weeks ago, I was absentmindedly scrolling through my Facebook feed when I noticed a meme a relative—we’ll call her Jenni—posted. “Lol,” she wrote, “too good not to share!” The meme was in English and Spanish, and read, “When people tell me I look White [sic] not mexican [sic]” then was followed by a litany (in Spanish) of talking-out-one’s-neck insults to the hypothetical insulter:
“Listen you tacky barefoot indian from the hills, not all Mexicans are the same dark-as-a-tire skin color as you.”
I stared blankly at post as it collected likes, the “tears of laugher” emojis, and “jajaja”’s piling up in the comments. I was shocked. Jenni posted this? My relative, who goes to protests for immigrant rights and anti-gentrification rallies, who knows all of our ita’s traditional recipes, who listens almost exclusively to salsa and cumbias? Does this person who shares my blood feel this way about my brothers, and our cousins who are considerably darker than she? Does my family member feel this way about me?
In posting this meme, my milk-white, freckled pariente Jenni was reproducing colorist attitudes and ideas that were not only accepted in Latinx communities but actively encouraged and enforced. It didn’t matter that we grew up together in San Francisco, one of the more liberal cities on the West Coast (pre-tech boom, of course). Colorism, the discrimination and prejudice of light-skinned People of Color (POC) against darker-skinned POC, has deep roots in Latinx communities and must be confronted…
Read the entire article here.
