In conversation with Ruby Asare

As promised, we’re back exploring this remarkable play; only this week we’ll be doing things a little differently.

I want to share with you a conversation I had with a good friend one summer’s morning as we embarked on a self-discovery walk around our local park. We discussed all things Seven Methods, colourism and the Cleo-coined term, lightie-itis; a condition suffered by light-skinned individuals who aren’t fully aware of their privilege. A condition she claims her friend Kara has.  

Now, if you’re checking into the Seven Methods conversation for the first time, you might want to jump back to #Part 1: Cultural Appropriation for the Nation, where you can see a brief overview of the play and take a deep dive into the appropriation of Black female bodies. But, if you’re all caught up, then allow me to introduce you to Ruby Asare.

A fellow member of the British Other, Ruby is a Black Mixed-race Woman who throughout her life has teetered on the edges of her opposing identities; delicately navigating ‘being non-White, but “not really Black”’ at the same time. She’s a Woman of British, Ghanaian and Scottish origin, who from a young age understood that her mixed-ness made her a unique curiosity. One whose tanned freckled skin was admired by White adults who cooed over her in park playgrounds. And one who, despite her lack of understanding at the time, took note of how her Black and White friends were starved of such attention.

“As a kid, I just thought I was special – which is nice and, don’t get me wrong, I am special, but now looking back I can see it was a bit sus of those adults to be complimenting a child on the colour of their skin.”

Ruby and I are two Black Women who, throughout our friendship, have shared similar experiences. However, we both acknowledge that the world does not view us in the same light. Thus, our experiences, while similar, have not been the same. Though, that’s not to say that as we converse we tussle over who has it better or worse, just that we acknowledge that we’re different. On the other hand, Jasmine Lee-Jones’s characters prepare for combat.

Throughout the play, we see a ‘dark-skinned’ Cleo and ‘light-skinned’ Kara arguing from their individual corners; each choosing to battle it out in what can only be described as the Oppression Olympics, instead of seeing the issue for what it is. A colourist war White supremacy initiated, enlisting dark and light skinned Black Women as its soldiers to fight on opposite sides.

As epitomised by the glorious Lupita Nyong’o, colourism can be best understood as ‘the daughter of racism’. Typically experienced within individual racial groups, it’s the discrimination of individuals with darker skin tones. Much like racism, colourism is centred around White supremacy; hence the closer to Whiteness you appear, the better, smarter and more desirable you are believed to be. Hence the phrase, ‘light-skin privilege’.

It’s existed alongside racism since its inception. However, given its intra-racial understanding, it has often been disregarded as an issue for minority communities to resolve on their own; a weed that we must pull from our own soil. But in truth, colourism is a Major Oak firmly rooted in the mainstream; a seed that was once planted, now a tree that branches out into our own communities. As autumn leaves fall, society is the ground that catches them in heaps; the compost rotting to cement stereotypes, intra-community hierarchy and shade-based bigotry that both people of colour and White society adhere to.

“Look around Kara. All the BW considered universally beautiful are lighties. Lighties with green eyes. Freckles. Racially ambiguous hunties. Girls who can get into DSTRKT … The love interests. All the girls in the music videos. Think about it: Beyonce, Rihanna, Jorja Smith. Cassie, Aayliah (may she rest in peace), Ashanti, Amerie! Fuck. It’s like the music industry just keeps a closet of 100 lighties and when they get bored they just throw another ten out.”

As Cleo rightly points out to Kara, historically the most influential Black people have been lighter in complexion: Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States; Halle Berry, the first Black Woman to win an academy award for best actress; Janelle Commissiong, the first Black Miss Universe and Beyoncé, the first Black Woman to headline at Coachella.

“It’s our proximity to Whiteness,” Ruby tells me. “Our ability to negotiate our identity, which allows us the first seats at the table.”

Unlike Kara, Ruby does not suffer from lightie-itis. Though, she notes that she only began to understand the societal position her skin colour awards her in recent years. A realisation triggered by her time at art school and now working in film and television, a notoriously difficult industry to penetrate, where she’s often the only person of colour in the room.

“It’s strange, because while I feel a sense of accomplishment for wedging my seat at the table, there’s a mourning for the people who aren’t there. There’s a bittersweet feeling of “well done for hiring a Black person, but I’m the Whitest Black person you could have hired”. That’s when I recognise my privilege.”

It’s true, skin tone has a grave impact on employability rates in most industries, where hiring one light-skinned Black person is seen as ‘enough’. Though, the work place is not the only problem area. We see it in the education system, where those with darker tones are more likely to be suspended than those with a lighter complexion. And then, there’s the likelihood of marriage.

“Furthermore, throughout our secondary education we both know every man was on you … Ask yourself this: Did I ever have a hoe phase? No. Why? Not a lightie.”

A study by Dr Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics and sociology at Ohio State University, observed the imbalance of ‘eligible’ Black Men in the marriage market. Hamilton notes that Black Men ‘have unnatural power within marriage markets [which] enables them to bid up cursory characteristics like skin shade’. To add, various observations across matchmaking sites have found that Black Men will often dismiss Black Women for being ‘too ethnic’; i.e. for having dark skin or natural hair.

“I never consented to being someone’s light-skinned fantasy … cus that’s what I was Cleo. That’s all I was.”

It’s a double-edged sword, Ruby explains, because while a lighter complexion may offer you the assumption of beauty, there’s a darker side to that privilege too; fetishization, a rife issue within our society and one best demonstrated in a viral video by VanBanter.

In 2017, the YouTuber took to the streets in a bid to find out if Black British youth are obsessed with light skin/curly hair or if it’s just a preference. He asks his participants: what kind of girls are you into?

The answer: ‘Light skin, big back’. ‘Mixed-race girls’. ‘Curly hair, has to be curly hair’. ‘I don’t really fuck with Black girls’. ‘Mostly light skin and caramel’. ‘No dark skins’. ‘No Black tings like my shoes’. ‘It’s obviously going to be the light skins, they’re stressful, but they’re confident’.

And they go on; each new group or individual repeating what was said before as if it were taught from a script, each one unknowingly objectifying and swayed by colourism.

“But you were still desired. I was discarded. Not even fucking seen to be discarded in the first place. Not even regarded. Constantly in your shadow.”

Ruby and I linger on this moment in the play, where the two Women reveal the thin veil between affection and fetishism. It was one of those double-back-and-make-you-think moments because essentially Kara’s experience, while oppressive, looks like privilege to Cleo. She doesn’t feel Kara’s internal discomfort as she reflects on her experience of light-skinned fetishism, instead all Cleo sees is that Kara is desired and wanted where she is not.

Ruby and I gently contemplate this, only she relates her own experiences to Kara’s frustration, where I relate mine to Cleo’s; the both of us at risk of entering a battle like Lee-Jones’s characters. But thankfully, with the sun’s rise on our walk comes the broadening of our horizons. Instead of expressing anger and frustration at our individual pain, we express if for each other’s.

This moment quickly becomes one of those times where we both acknowledge that we share a similar experience yet understand that the world does not view us in the same light. Neither’s experience is necessarily better or worse. Instead they are both tragic, upsetting, inherently linked, but somehow, at the same time, different.

Where Cleo and Kara hammer their individual points home, Ruby and I allow each other room. She lends an ear to my unique struggles, while I listen intently to hers; being made to feel like she’s not Black enough, the grating assumption that she thinks she’s better than everyone else because she’s light-skinned, her brushes with Mixed-race fetishism and the darkest of them all, her experiences of racism within her own family. Where one might believe the grass to be greener the lighter you are, it’s clear that isn’t always the case.

“Despite what society believes about mixed-race people being some wonderful emblem of equality, the reality is far from it.”

At the end of the day, there are different levels to Black oppression; however, regardless of your shade of Black, as a people, we are all subjugated and it’s important that we don’t allow those differences in oppression to divide us.

An issue like colourism will ultimately have you oppressing your own people, be that for being too Black or not Black enough. But, that is the insidious nature of the war that White supremacy instigated. Here we stand, soldiers on opposing sides, even though we are all fighting for the same cause; Blackness. Our own individual Blackness and that as the collective.

We ought to be able to recognise each other’s experiences, without undermining them with our own. Our experiences are intertwined and while that may encourage us to speak about both light-skinned fetishism and anti-Blackness in tandem, we also ought to speak about them separately. For, each issue deserves to be acknowledged for what it is and given its own moment in the sun to be cleansed. 

As Ruby puts it: “the Black experience is nuanced and I think there’s room for us to all listen to and uplift each other, without playing Oppression Olympics.”

On the topic of light-itis, it’s clear that there is no place for such ignorance in the Black cause. So, check yourself and check everyone around you. We live in a society where being light-skinned is a privilege, but ‘the best use of that privilege?’, Ruby says, ‘pull up more chairs or create a whole new table’.

And I couldn’t agree more Ruby, I couldn’t agree more. *Sips Tea*