There is a very nasty feeling of rejection that brown-skinned black women feel and internalize when they constantly see black men dating white women or extremely light-skinned black women exclusively, says radio personality Jacque Reid. When acclaimed actress Regina King seethed in a recent interview that she and her friends have gotten tired of waiting for black men to notice them as the men continue to court white women and others, it was far from an isolated incident.
The chocolate-coated Reid and other women panelists became very emotional on a Tom Joyner Fantastic Voyage panel discussion, “Black Beauty,” hosted by Lamman Rucker, when recounting times in their lives when they’ve been made to feel not good enough because they happened to be wrapped in cinnamon-tinted skin instead of vanilla or beige. Brown-skinned sisters’ beef is that society and many black men favor women with less melanin.
“It’s just that from the time that you are a little girl, you are treated like you are not good enough — ‘your hair is nappy,’ [or] ‘it’s not long enough’ — and then you see your men choosing women who look more white than you do or are white,” Reid said, with discernable anger in her voice. “It’s not about demonizing black men, but we black women feel the rejection. We feel like we are not good enough,” Reid added as the mostly female audience applauded. “It hurts and it impacts you. For a lot of us, it is difficult to get past.”
Rucker, while sympathetic to Reid’s complaint, says a grown man has to be free to make his own decision. But then Rucker broke it down further.
“… I don’t want to jump so far as to demonize men. There are choices being made that have nothing to do with you all [brown-skinned women or] not being worthy … every time you see a man who is with someone else [outside the race] it’s [not] about you not being worthy,” Rucker said.
Rucker and BET commentator Jeff Johnson believe that mentorship of young black males would intercept some of the deep mental anguish or emotional problems that occur that would make black men turn against black women. –terry shropshire
