Dark Girls documentary


Its not often that I hop on a soap box in this electronic world I've made to communicate with you. But every once in a while it feels trite to just post something and let you think of it what you will, independent of my personal notions about the subject matter. For this post, I really wanted to accentuate the significance of exploring such an important aspect of Western culture (and for that matter all colonialized societies or cultures that have been influenced by Western thinking). 

In the Americas, the vestiges of slavery still persist. All over the world, for that matter, the disenfranchised seem to be the more dark complected members of society. Authors, social and political figures, artists and activists from Angela Davis to Spike Lee, have long explored the three headed monster that is the systematic degradation of Black people. 

I have often been one of very few people of Color, in school, in the workplace and in my own neighborhood. In such an environment, you learn very quickly how skewed the dimensions of the American psyche are. What people outside of Black culture often misunderstand or fail to recognize, is how profoundly we've been taught, throughout our history, to hate ourselves. This is the most complex aspect of discrimination to understand and overcome.

Enter- Dark Girls. The upcoming documentary explores the deep-seated biases and attitudes about skin color that are experienced particularly by dark-skinned women, outside of and within African-American culture.

Here are just a few excerpts from the film, revealing what these courageous women had to say about being dark complected in America:

"I can remember being in the bathtub asking my mom to put bleach in the water so that my skin would be lighter and so that I could escape the feelings I had about not being as beautiful, as acceptable, as lovable."

"She's pretty for a dark-skinned girl ... What is that supposed to mean?"

"They used to say, 'You stayed in the oven too long.' "

"It was so damaging ... it made it seem like we weren't wanted; that we were less than."

"The racism that we have a people amongst ourselves is a direct backlash of slavery."

While the issue certainly isn't brand new, this approach appears to be. Colorism traditionally arises in an adversarial fashion: Someone accuses someone else (a director, a magazine editor, perhaps all of Hollywood) of embracing unfair standards of beauty that exclude many black women. 

Dark Girls seems to take a different angle. Rather than vilifying the perpetrators of bias, the preview shows women being allowed to tell their own stories in a manner that sends an undeniable message about how nonsensical, painful and historically fraught our stubborn views of skin color and beauty can be.

The film is being produced by Bill Duke for Duke Media and D. Channsin Berry for Urban Winter Entertainment, and co-produced by Bradinn French and edited by Bradinn French.