Black Students Still Favor Lighter Skin, Study Finds

By Kai Beasley
Black College Wire

Photo illustration by Kenon White/Black College Wire

A majority of African American students polled at a Midwestern university say lighter complexions are more attractive than darker ones, according to a study conducted by researchers from two Louisiana schools.

The results, taken from a sample of 100 students, indicated that 96 percent of the men preferred a medium to light complexion in women while 70 percent of women found light skin of value in men.

This latest analysis of mating preferences explored a number of probable causes, all of which were rooted in the "colorism" prevalent from slavery through the 1960s, where lighter skin typically meant more privilege. The results were published in 2006 in the journal Race, Gender and Class.

Ashraf Esmail, a sociology and criminal justice professor at Delgado Community College in New Orleans, and Jas M. Sullivan, an assistant professor of political science and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, conducted the study.

According to Sullivan, its purpose was to test whether the color line continues to be a problem for the African American community.

"We know that there has been a preference for lighter skin in the past as a result of racism," said Sullivan, "but we really wanted to know whether or not that preference still exists in the 21st century."

The researchers asked 50 African American men and 50 African American women, all students at a large Midwestern university, to participate in semi-structured interviews. The university was not named in the study and Sullivan declined to provide the name for this story.

The students were all between 18 and 19 years old with complexions ranging from light to dark. Each subject was shown pictures of light, medium and dark-skinned men or women from fashion magazines and asked to rate the images based on attractiveness. In addition, each respondent was asked questions about their mating preferences in terms of skin color and about the value of skin color in the African American community.

One reason for the difference in answers between African American men and African American women, according to the authors, is that women tended to take more characteristics into account, such as lips, hair, eyes, height and style of dress, when determining a man's attractiveness.

The interviews pointed to slavery and a social stigma attached to darker skin.

"I think that people are valued for their light skin," said one student. "You can take this theory way back to the house slave mentality. I think a lot of people, because that was valued, were taught to value light skin. I think it is still an ongoing type of thing, and society really has not lost that altogether."

Both men and women cited media as a driving force in the preference for lighter skin.

"When you talk to a guy, he thinks that he wants a perfect girl he sees on the videos. Usually, the women portrayed in the videos are light-skinned and have long hair," said one respondent.

Still, another participant argued that African Americans don't divide themselves based on light and dark complexions. Rather, the greater issue is color prejudice in the United States as a whole.

"Black people just see all black people as black no matter if they are light or dark. If you have any black in you, the black community considers you black."

Analysis for the Esmail-Sullivan study took place in 2000. Though it is the most recent on the subject, its results differ dramatically from an earlier study of African American college students conducted in 1997.

Louie E. Ross, then associate professor of sociology at Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville, N.C., interviewed 149 African American men and 236 African American women for his study, "Mate Selection Preferences among African American College Students." His research was conducted on the campuses of two historically black institutions in the Southeast; one public and one private.

The Ross study indicated that only 16.4 percent of women would prefer to date a person of a lighter complexion and 16.8 percent of women would want to marry a person with light skin. The study showed that 33.3 percent of men preferred to date a person of a lighter complexion and 38.3 would prefer lighter skin in a marriage partner.

Taken together, the research by Esmail and Sullivan and the earlier research by Ross indicate that colorism does have some impact on the African American community.

Esmail and Sullivan concluded that, "Further research in this area is needed. Clearly, colorism continues to plague the African-American community and we must first accept that claim and begin to find solutions that would ameliorate the superiority of light skin color to dark skin color."

Sullivan said there were plans to expand the research to other schools and to include historically black colleges. One of the issues he and Esmail plan to address is that colorism isn't unique to the African American community, he said.

The New York Times reported on May 30 that the most popular cosmetic products among modern Indian women are those that lighten the skin. Didier Villanueva, country manager for L'Oreal India, said in the article that "fairness creams" account for half of India's skin care market.

In the 2005 book "Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice," Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost reports that lighter women were preferred in medieval Japan, Aztec Mexico and Moorish Spain, even before there was significant contact with Western ideology.

Sullivan said, "What we sought to uncover in this study is whether or not the preference for lighter skin still exists" in the African American community. "Clearly you could make the connection between the preference for lighter skin and the past, but the deeper question, the question that needs much more observation is the why. Why does the black community self-select? Is this preference a dormant trait, is it something psychological, or is it just that light skin is all we see in the media and that affects our choices? These are the questions that still need answering."

Other studies published by Esmail and Sullivan include: "Black Candidates in Search of Electoral Support: Is Success Dependent on Residential Integration and Social Interaction?" (2003), "Interaction Patterns between Black and White College Students: For Better or Worse?" (2002), and "From Racial Uplift to Personal Economic Security: Declining Idealism in Black Education" (2002).

Kai Beasley is a May graduate of Emory University.