Dear fellow light skinned POC,
Being rejected for your lightness is not nor will it ever be, the same as being rejected for your darkness or visible Blackness.
It just isn’t ever going to be the same.
I need y'all to understand, and I mean understand, the rejection of whiteness and/or lightness by ethnically and racially marginalized peoples is a reflection of learned fear of our/their oppressors.
The rejection by those same marginalized peoples of darkness and Blackness, in specific, is due to the fact that rejecting, harming, disenfranchising, and challenging claims to mixed/multiple identities of visible Black/African Diaspora peoples will always be viewed as an easy route to authenticity/autonomy under white supremacy.
The rejection of visible racial difference, in which racial difference is largely read as darkness of skin (and there are other elements to it, but having skin color that is not pure-as-the-driven-mayo white is the biggie to traditions of white supremacy), is seen as the Get Out of Jail Free pass.
So when we, light-skinned peoples, talk about our difficulties fitting in, we have to really examine what we’re talking about. We have to acknowledge a world system that continually favors us for “not looking Black” (feel free to replace with [X], if you must).
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So yeah, we may have shit to deal with, and internalized issues in regard to our authenticity, depending on our backgrounds, but it will never be the same as the struggle for identity our dark-skinned peoples work under.
