(Page 4 of 51) - Effects of Skin Color Bias in SES on Political Attitudes and Activities authored by Hochschild, Jennifer., Weaver, Vesla. and Burch, Traci.

racialized as a distinct group or are best thought of as a loosely-linked ethnicity with many races.
We return to this issue in the discussion and conclusion.

More central to the analysis in this paper, however, is the fact that how people behave

and are treated is affected not only by the nominal category of race, but also by the ordinal
category of multiple shades of skin tone. This is the phenomenon of “colorism” – “the tendency
to perceive or behave toward members of a racial category based on the lightness or darkness of
their skin tone” (Maddox and Gray 2002: 250). As with racism, a pejorative connotation is built
into the word. Also like racism, it can be defined either unidirectionally (only those with power
and status, i.e. light-skinned people, can exhibit colorism) or multidirectionally (people of one
skin shade can denigrate or subordinate people of another, in any possible direction).

Colorism

can occur within one’s own community, or across racial and ethnic groups.

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Within communities of color, hierarchy based on skin tone is long-standing and openly
acknowledged. Lawrence Graham, for example, writes,

I knew some [other black people] who not only had complexions ten shades lighter than
that brown paper bag, and hair as straight as any ruler, but also had multiple generations
of “good looks,” wealth, and accomplishment…. It was a color thing and a class thing.
And for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together
(Graham 2000).

Our more systematic historical research shows that the importance of skin color on life chances
dates back at least to the nineteenth century. Lighter-skinned black soldiers in the Union Army
in the Civil War were, compared with darker-skinned soldiers, more likely to be skilled workers
rather than field hands before entering the service (data from Metzer and Margo 1990). Sergeants
and lieutenants were most likely to come from the lighter-skinned members of the group while
darker soldiers were ranked lower on average; black soldiers with light skin were more likely to
be promoted during their tenure in the Army. These soldiers were significantly taller (a measure
of nutrition) than their darker counterparts and -- most striking of all -- the lightest members of
the black regiments were significantly less likely to die in service (for results, see Appendix 1;
see also Margo 1992: 176-78. For other discussions of the historical role of skin color, see
Frazier 1957; Myrdal 1944; Drake and Cayton 1993 [1945]; Landry 1987; Rothman 2003.).

The same hierarchy obtains, with equally deep associations, among Latinos. Spanish and

Portuguese colonists developed elaborate rules for ranking individuals according to a complex
mixture of race, physical appearance, wealth, cultural heritage, and slave status. One scholar
summarizes the “system of racial stratification that persists to the present day in most Latin
American nations” thus:

Whites generally have a superior status. People of Indian racial background whose
cultural practices are mainly of Portuguese or Spanish derivation… would be next on the
social ladder. Mestizos, people of mixed indigenous and white background, would have a
higher rating than those of largely Indian background. At the bottom of the social

The first person to file legal charges of color discrimination was a light-skinned black woman who believed that

she was being harassed by her darker-skinned supervisor (Russell et al. 1992: 124-26). Suits claiming the opposite
have also been filed; so far, no one has won damages on the grounds of discrimination by color, as distinguished
from race or ethnicity.