(The Root) — The upcoming documentary Dark Girls explores the deep-seated biases and attitudes about skin color that are experienced particularly by dark-skinned women, outside of and within African-American culture. While the issue certainly isn’t brand new, this approach appears to be. Colorism traditionally arises in an adversarial fashion: Someone accuses someone else (a director, a magazine editor, perhaps all of Hollywood) of embracing unfair standards of beauty that exclude many black women. (Just today, Osama bin Laden’s former mistress Kola Boof took to Twitter to attack rapper Wale for perpetuating dominant standards of beauty in his music video for “Pretty Girls,” calling him self-loathing.)
