The World Hates What It Cannot Whitenby Marvella on behalf of PoCCo

My parents love to joke that out of all my siblings, I’m the least likely to marry outside my race. It’s funny to me, especially when I think back to my primary and middle school days. Back then, I was deep into white boy culture. My phone wallpaper, my bedroom walls, my lockscreen… all white boys. My motto back then? The whiter the chocolate, the better.

But then I moved to France and actually met white boys in real life, something shifted. I could feel it: my Blackness wasn’t considered attractive to them. There are two words for that feeling: racism and colorism. Like racism, colorism is a product of slavery and colonialism. It’s the belief that dark skin is less worthy, less beautiful, less desirable than lighter skin.

In my last year of high school, I ran a project for Women in Black’s social media where we asked students to name their favorite famous Black woman. And what were the most popular answers? Almost all were light-skinned women. This is the pattern I’ve seen my whole life. Growing up, all the girls considered the “prettiest” were lighter. I’d internalised it so much that, when someone once told me I looked lighter after moving to France, I took it as a compliment. That wasn’t praise, it was proof of how deeply these biases run. Since that moment, I’ve stopped chasing lighter skin.

In France, talking about race made me deeply uncomfortable. French society has a way of gaslighting you into believing race is irrelevant. In history class, we were told that race doesn’t exist and that it was invented to justify colonization. And yes — that’s one hundred percent true. But what frustrated me was the leap from “race is a social construct” to “race no longer matters.” As if declaring it fake somehow erases the very real ways it still shapes our lives today.

People may try to navigate the world under a “colour-blind” banner, but their true colors and prejudices always show. The blindness isn’t to colour itself, it’s to the inequality staring them in the face. I asked a group of white men at my university if they found Black women attractive. The answers didn’t surprise me. Most of them hadn’t even thought about it. And that’s the irony: while attraction to us is barely a passing thought for them. There is so much discourse around what it means for a Black woman to date a white man: from the fetishization to the whispers. It’s rarely just about two people; it’s about the stereotypes that trail behind us into every relationship.

Dark skin is and never was ugly. The discomfort you cause in certain rooms is not a flaw; it’s the reaction of a society built to worship whiteness. So, to quote “Brown Skin Girl” by Beyoncé: “Your skin is not only dark, it shines and it tells your story.”

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