ABSTRACT
Colorism, a term originally conceived by Alice Walker (1983) in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose , is a destructive force
characterized by “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color” (p. 290). “For colorism,” she writes, “like colonialism, sexism, and racism, impedes us” (p. 291). Walker’s recognition of color bias as a repressive influence is well placed. In the United States (U.S.), the roots of colorism can be traced back to the colonial period and era of slavery, where Blackness was debased (Jordan, 1968) and lighter-skinned children of Black slave women and White slavemasters gained ascendancy in the slave system such as by working as house slaves, being trained to complete skilled rather than common labor on plantations, receiving manumission, and perhaps most importantly during the era, becoming educated (Hunter, 2004; Williamson, 1995). The regularity of color-based privileges among enslaved and free Blacks subsequently informed the nation’s early color caste hierarchy as well as socioeconomic divisions that created identifiable Black elite (Gatewood, 1988; Perkins, 1997) and Black middle-class (Frazier, 1957/1997) sectors in post-Emancipation America.
