I’m not going to lie. For a time there, I was trying to avoid watching Bill Dukes’ Light Girls like the plague. After its predecessor, Dark Girls, came out, I wondered if it was really a good idea to try and compare the experiences of black women of a darker complexion to those of lighter-skinned black women. What would that help? But after running into the documentary on accident while flipping through my favorite channels last night, I can say that there isn’t any kind of comparing and contrasting going on. It’s just women sharing their personal struggles about not feeling black enough, and internal and external battles over their looks. They just wanted their stories to be heard, and after two hours of listening to all of them, I can admit that they were all very interesting and compelling–so much so, that I took notes. Here are 10 things that stood out and really got me thinking after watching Light Girls.
Women Overcompensating For Not Feeling Black Enough
Kym Whitley shared a story about the way that she used to treat her mother, who was very light, because of her own insecurities with her skin. She now says that she realizes that she was overcompensating at times and ganging up on her mom because she didn’t feel like she was black enough:
“My father was very, very, very dark and my mother was very, very, very light. I thought she was a white woman. So that’s a problem right there. My momma was light and I did tease her about it. I was like, ‘You’re white, and I’m going to get some DNA on you cause you’re lying. But now that we’re talking about it, maybe that’s the thing: I’m trying to be too black sometimes. I’ve done the reverse thing. Because of my mother being so fair and people thinking she was white, because of being teased, people come in my house and they say, why you got so much black art? Why you got so much Africa around you? I never thought about it, but I think I was trying to make up for not being black enough, you know?”
