As a Light-Skinned Black Woman, It's My Mission to Be an Advocate for Anyone With Darker Skin Tones

HELLA BLACK, LIGHTLY MELANATEDMy Light Skin and Loose Curls Give Me Even More Responsibility to Advocate for Other Black WomenGuest editor Michaela angela Davis explores the role of "redbone" women, like herself, with access to a certain level of privilege in the movement for Black liberation — and the responsibility to shine light on their darker-skinned sisters.

By Michaela Angela Davis

May 14, 2022

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There are different kinds of leaders. Some are spurred on by power or ambition; others are motivated by the social positioning of an institution. Early in my career as a magazine editor, I was mentored by a leader who had a different drive — she loved her audience above all else. Susan L. Taylor was the editor in chief of Essence magazine in the ‘80s and ’90s, and she served Black women first and fiercely. In the early '90s, Essence was the only mainstream media outlet that
reported solely on — and celebrated — Black women's lives. We stood within the gaping chasm of
erasure that Hollywood, music, fashion, politics, and virtually all other public-facing industries held for Black women, women of color generally, and darker-skinned women specifically. 

In nearly every weekly editors' meeting, Taylor would articulate the pain of deeper-hued women — a pain of not being seen, of the preference for light-skinned Black women by the media and by men. There I would sit, invariably the lightest of all the sisters in her office, soaking it all in. It would soon become a personal charge: to be the most vocal advocate of Black women with deeper skin tones. A self-appointed light-skin and loose-curl monitor, I was to make certain there was a balance of deeper tones and tighter textured hair. I was hyperaware that my purely physical proximity to whiteness afforded me an added measure of access to high-end fashion spaces and high-profile "general market" (read: white) media platforms. I pierced those spaces because of a perceived "acceptability," and knowing that further drove my responsibility toward equitable representation across the Black skin and hair spectrum. Thirty years on, that reflex remains embedded in me.

In 2013, Yaba Blay, PhD, published her book One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. As a deep-toned Ghanaian American Blackwoman growing up in New Orleans, she explored her notions about light-skinned Black folks with honesty, imagery, rigorous research, and scholarship. In the following months and years, Dr. Blay and I held a series of public conversations, and we focused on how comparing skin among Black women erodes the very sisterhood that underlies our superpower. We wanted to heal us first. In these discussions, several held on college campuses, I bore witness to the same pain and frustration my beloved mentor had articulated two decades prior: Anti-Blackness is most vividly seen in the disdain and dismissal of dark-skinned Black women.

When this magazine's editor-in-chief, Jessica Cruel, and I decided to focus the first Melanin Edit issue of Allure on legacy and liberation, I knew I wanted to have a cross-generational exploration of contemporary Black women in the liberation movement. Nikole Hannah-Jones and Sage (Grace Dolan- Sandrino) were the first two women who came to mind. Then came the truth: The image of the two of them (and me) flashed before me and my editorial muscles flexed — all light-skinned. Although Hannah-Jones and Sage are both without question liberators and hella Black, as a trio we are rather scant on melanin. 

Illustration by Yazmin Butcher

Illustration by Yazmin Butcher

But then came more truth: The legacy of lighter-skinned liberators is well-documented in Black history. I thought of a young Rosa Parks — her complexion close to the Muscogee Creek People that once populated Alabama. Then there was Angela Davis, whose skin is reminiscent of the sand hues along the Black Warrior River near her Birmingham birthplace. I considered Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, with that gorgeous beauty mark on her forehead. I heard the emancipation poetics of Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez (who taught me to address Black women as, "My dear, dear sister"). When I say the names of these Black women, I do not think of the color of their Black skin, but rather of the skin they put into the movement for Black liberation, women's liberation, and the liberation of all people. 

Sixty years ago during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrations, sitting down, sitting in, and walking out captured the attention of the country. In the next decade, the Black Power Movement saw massive demonstrations and mammoth intellects render searing speeches. And the Black Lives Matter Movement has yielded global uprisings, scholarship, and literature that will forever change how American history is understood and taught. 

Hannah-Jones and Sage are the latest chapter in this long-held tradition of courageously speaking truth to power. For Hannah-Jones, the fire of her brilliant revolutionary work (The 1619 Project, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize) and her homegirl humanity are her defining features — not her skin color. When recently casting for The Hair Tales, a docuseries based on my work that I am coexecutive producing with Tracee Ellis Ross and Oprah Winfrey, I said that, while there are scores of light-skinned and mixed Black women with compelling stories about their hair and identity, there were to be no "light and loose" guests on the show. Why? Because Ross and I would already be spending a lot of time in the limelight. Still, I wanted to cast Hannah-Jones, one of the most celebrated Black women of our time. It had not occurred to me, until I put a photo of her on a mood board, that she fits squarely in the "redbone" category. 

The term, very popular when I was growing up in Washington, DC, was used for light-skinned, lighter-haired/eyed Black women. In her service to history and her humanity, the content of Hannah-Jones's character is the ultimate example of a liberator to me, and she does it all while wearing her naturally textured hair in her chosen color of flaming red. I suspect Hannah-Jones will be framed in history as one of the intellectual giants of the Black Lives Matter Movement, whose radical reporting gave us empirical and empowering historical facts about the foundation on whose land and labor this democracy project was built.

"Blackness is as diverse as the very earth on which we stand. It is like the sands of Sierra Leone, brown and red like the clay dirt of Georgia, and deeply dark like the fertile soil of the Black Belt Prairie in Alabama and Mississippi."

The Black women of Gen Z are also using their words to liberate. Consider Sage, a community-centered trans artist and activist. Her father is first-gen Afro-Cuban and her mother is white. I recently had breakfast with her in a little coffee spot in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where we talked liberation, and the protective nature of lashes.

At 21, Sage is already an iconic force, designed to be a liberator through difficulty and divine order. Like many trans women of color, her childhood was rife with trauma, displacement, and violence. Nearly everywhere was a minefield: her school and her hood. "When I was ten or eleven, white boys were throwing glass at me," she remembered, "calling me a porch monkey, a faggot, everything." She was physically bullied and verbally abused by her peers while unprotected and misunderstood by many adults and school administrators. Coming out as trans at school was not her choice (a student Kik-messengered a personal photo of her dressed as a girl), but her coming out to the world would be an act of providence.

"The three things that led me to do the work I do were fear, necessity to change the reality that instilled that fear in me, and [knowing] the privilege I held as a light-skinned trans girl with the tools and resources to push forward the fight for liberation," she told me. Her activism led her into policy work, beginning with telling her powerful story (under an alias) to the Human Rights Campaign. That paved the way to working with the National Center for Transgender Equality and becoming an ambassador to the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans during the Obama administration. At the time, many LGBTQ+ organizations had been operating for decades through an adult, white, gay male and lesbian veneer.

Recognizing community as "our greatest resource," Sage founded a multimedia platform, Team Mag, that spotlights young Black and brown artists. "I want to center narratives of Black queer and trans [people] around joy, happiness, thriving, to give us the opportunity to see us reflected in those narratives that we are so often denied." When Sage told me, "My childhood was robbed from me the minute I said I was trans," my heart sank and my eyes dropped, but then I looked up and deep into the face of this amazing young woman full of brilliant possibilities.

Her go-to makeup look is a tinted moisturizer, concealer, and some contouring. "I want to be able to feel my beauty and to feel my femininity," she said. "I felt that makeup was not only a tool to do that, but, you know, 40 minutes to sit down and look at yourself in the mirror." And you will likely never catch Sage without a set of fierce eyelashes: "Lashes became my favorite thing. I understood them as kind of like my little armor going into the world."

To a random bystander, Sage is an easily identifiable face of a multiracial Black (or maybe brown)
person. Through the lens of her life and all the other light-skinned liberators before her, however, she is yet another example that Blackness, especially in the United States, is as diverse as the very earth to which we came and on which we stand. Like the land itself, Blackness in America is vast. It is pale like the sands of the beaches of Freetown in Sierra Leone, brown and red like the clay dirt in the hills of Georgia, and deeply dark like the fertile soil of the Black Belt Prairie in Alabama and Mississippi. Every shade of Blackness has shaped the story of our country and moved us all toward the radiance of liberation.

It's been a long time since I sat cross-legged at the feet of my first editor and mentor in a room full of Black women journalists who were hard-pressed to name five prominent darker-skinned women who could "carry a cover." Nowhere could we see a media mogul with one name Oprah, a First Lady last name Obama, or a Supreme Court justice first name Ketanji. Decades later, representation across the skin spectrum is better. But from my privileged perspective, the light still needs to shine brighter on the darker side of Black.

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2022 issue of Allure. Learn how to subscribe here.

More from The Melanin Edit:

• How Atlanta Became a Hub for Beauty Startups
• Black Women Have Used Self-Affirmation for Centuries. Why Does Instagram Make It Look So White?
• The Afrofuturist Beauty Renaissance Is Happening Now

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