Colorism Follows You Everywhere You Go

The past two years have been a time of reflection for everyone around the world (and if it hasn’t been, that’s a conversation you need to have with yourself). From working in a nonprofit community-based healthcare clinic in the midst of a pandemic to ultimately changing careers, reflecting meant understanding my identity. I needed to learn to love who I am and be able to fully accept God’s decree. 

I was born and raised in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. Recent estimates signify that Dearborn is the first American city with a majority-Arab population. Because I grew up in an environment where I was in the majority, I didn’t feel the marginalization that other American Arabs/Muslims experience in majority-white or majority-Christian communities. 

Even though I didn’t experience Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiment growing up, there was another form of racism I grew up experiencing from people in my own community.

The Arab world is not excluded from the treacherous colorism that dominates so many societies, with the appearance of white skin and white features celebrated and coveted.

Since Dearborn is a mini-Middle East, the immigrants brought with them their customs and traditions, including colorism—sadly, it did not drop in the Atlantic Ocean on their way to America.

 Arabs from the southernmost countries, including my Yemeni family, tend to be darker skinned. I have a tan complexion, and before becoming a teenager, I didn’t care about it. However, I caught wind of comments from other families and neighbors suggesting that all Arabs should be concerned about keeping their skin as light as possible. When I would go knocking on my friend’s door so she could come play outside, she would tell me she cannot come outside when it’s sunny because her mom said it would make her dark and ugly. 

As I grew older and got to middle school, I began to feel a sense of shame about my identity and my skin color. I was in a school full of Arab kids from the Levant (northwestern region of the Arabian peninsula), and within this micro-culture, I was in a minority as a Yemeni. I began to hear racist remarks towards me like “burnt toothpick” or “you dirty Yemeni.” I had friends who were Yemeni but had a lighter complexion, and I would hear people tell them that they were too white to be a Yemeni or too pretty to be a Yemeni. These statements deepened my sense of shame, and I began to change myself and hang out with the wrong crowd so I didn’t have to hear that again. I lost myself completely and began to ask my Yemeni friends to not be friends with me during school because of how ashamed they made me feel for being Yemeni. 

 Allah is the best of planners, and at this moment around the end of seventh grade, my family decided to uproot our lives and move to Yemen for a year. A part of me felt relieved because I knew I was going to a place where I would be surrounded by my people. I felt like I was going to be in my community, accepted and loved for who I am. But I was wrong. The colorism I experienced in Dearborn followed me to Yemen.

There was a strong presence of intra-community colorism, and those with lighter complexions received more compliments and privileges.

An even darker side of colorism started to come to my attention, seeing fellow Yemenis who were distinctly Black being treated less than human right in front of me. My family in Yemen told me that they were the untouchables and that I should not approach them. 

At the same time, my lookalike cousins would make fun of me for being tan, because apparently, being American was supposed to be a part of my DNA, and I should have had blonde hair and blue eyes as stereotyped to them in the media. I began to feel uncomfortable in my skin, all over again. Was I really that ugly because I was tan? My parents have a medium-to-fair complexion, so why didn’t I? I needed to change. I started to remember what my friends’ parents would tell them as children, and I would spend my time inside and away from the sun. I began to do anything and everything my cousins would tell me to make me appear white, leading me to begin using the infamous Fair & Lovely face cream. Through that entire year, I used multiple tubes of that horrifying face cream. I even brought some with me back to the States—after all, I didn’t remember ever seeing such a cream in America, so I wanted to make sure I had enough to last me a while. This was a very low point for me.

I felt like my trip to Yemen wasn’t meant for me to learn about these harmful societal norms. Rather than whitewashing my identity, I needed to learn more about my ethnicity and understand more about the grace of Yemen. Yemen is a beautiful country with a profound culture and history, and the kindness of the people like no other. I spent many months traveling around the country, through rural communities that maintained an old way of livelihood. I learned more about the preservation of Yemeni culture and how the people remained unapologetic and prideful about their heritage. The villagers accepted the way they looked and opted for a simple way of life. White bleaching creams and westernized beauty standards were irrelevant in their communities.

I started to really admire my roots and my cultural heritage, and educating myself on where my family came from gave me a sense of cultural pride. 

I spent a year in Yemen, and upon returning to the U.S., I started to see myself in a different light. Dearborn didn’t change much, but I began to slowly understand where the racism I was experiencing was rooted. Whereas before I just viewed it as racism towards Yemenis, this time, I began to realize that what I was experiencing in Dearborn was not solely because of my Yemeni heritage but also because of my darker complexion skin. I started to learn more about historical racism and how those who were lighter skinned were able to escape parts of the reality that darker skinned individuals went through. This was a colorism issue, and I had a long journey ahead of me. I was coming back with a sense of my cultural identity intact, but I didn’t realize all the obstacles I was going to face. During my young adulthood, social media began to flourish, and filters became the rave. While I stopped using whitening creams, I still couldn’t love myself because the damage of colorism was instilled in me. I didn’t need whitening creams, because Snapchat and Instagram filters did the work for me. I began experiencing body dysmorphia because I grew so used to seeing my face in that lens. 

Then, during my senior year of college, I read a tweet that said something along the lines of: “imagine your loved one passes away, and the only photos you have of them have a dog filter,” and that scared me to pieces. At the time, I was working with Detroit high schoolers who were so unapologetically themselves. Their confidence in their skin, their hair, their ethnic features was so radiating, I felt it heal the wounds I carried where colorism left a scar. They uplifted other Brown and Black women, starting every morning with: “Miss, you are so pretty, you know that.”

That summer was a turning point for me. I decided to take myself off all social media (I mean except for Twitter, because I need my daily dose of Twitter news), because I couldn’t have the trigger and the temptation of a Snapchat camera with a “beauty” filter. I needed to learn to take photographs using my phone camera, even if I thought it made my face look flipped or if I felt self-conscious of my tan skin.

My journey doesn’t stop here. There are parts of my community that are still stuck in the mindset that light skin is “prettier.”

I’m learning to educate others, to dismantle social systems that are unacceptable and that hurt women like me with darker skin. Educating others serves as a constant reminder to myself and keeps me in a positive consciousness about my tan skin. 

This is the real me. And I love the real me, tan and beautiful.