{"id":38193,"date":"2014-11-09T21:51:33","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T21:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38193"},"modified":"2014-11-09T21:51:33","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T21:51:33","slug":"when-whites-are-guilty-of-colorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38193","title":{"rendered":"When whites are guilty of colorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

When whites are guilty of colorism<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2014-11-08<\/p>\n

Lance Hannon<\/strong><\/a>, Professor
\nDepartment of Sociology and Criminology
\nVillanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n

Robert DeFina<\/strong><\/a>, Professor
\nDepartment of Sociology and Criminology
\nVillanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n

The 1964 Civil Rights Act<\/em><\/a> prohibits employment discrimination based on<\/a> \u201crace, color, religion, sex, or national origin.\u201d However, in our public discourse, the second of those categories \u2014 \u201ccolor\u201d \u2014 is rarely mentioned as a source of discrimination distinct from \u201crace.\u201d And when \u201ccolorism\u201d \u2014 discrimination based on skin shade \u2014 does get discussed, it is framed almost exclusively as something that occurs only within a racial group \u2014 \u201cblack-on-black discrimination,\u201d as a 2005 segment of ABC\u2019s \u201c20\/20\u201d program<\/a> put it.<\/p>\n

But is that correct? There are two common reasons colorism by whites gets overlooked. First, social science seems to bolster anecdotal evidence that white people see variation in skin tone in a narrower range than African Americans do. Second, given that one\u2019s racial category has always been of such great importance in the United States \u2014 think of the infamous \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>\u201d \u2014 any impact of skin-tone differences within racial categories is assumed to be minuscule in comparison. While both of these rationales may seem to make sense on the surface, on close inspection neither provides justification for ignoring clear, real-life consequences of white colorism.<\/p>\n

Regarding the first point: Our recent analysis<\/a> of data from the National Opinion Research Center\u2019s long-running General Social Survey<\/a> confirms that African Americans and whites judge skin tone quite differently. In particular, white observers perceive the skin tones of black individuals as much darker than black observers do. This is consistent with other data <\/a>showing that, to use one example, roughly 42 percent of whites describe Tiger Woods<\/a> as having \u201cdark\u201d or \u201cvery dark\u201d skin, while only about 14 percent of African Americans say the same. But such results do not mean that white people are \u201ctone-blind.\u201d In fact, there is solid evidence that white people do indeed see significant variation in African American skin tones. It is just that this variation is concentrated at the darker end of the scale…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When whites are guilty of colorism The Washington Post 2014-11-08 Lance Hannon, Professor Department of Sociology and Criminology Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania Robert DeFina, Professor Department of Sociology and Criminology Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on \u201crace, color, religion, sex, or national origin.\u201d However, in our public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[240,18384,18383,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-38193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-colorism","tag-lance-hannon","tag-robert-defina","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}