The Stupidity of Shadism- A Rant

* The usual rant disclaimers apply so yes, dear hearts, it's a long read. Love you all, booskis and please don't forget to share, comment and (if you haven't already) subscribe!*

"You're from abroad? Where? Really? You sound it, but why are you so black?"

I was about 9, on my first trip to Nigeria. I had just been dropped off at a Nigerian boarding school by my Papa to 'soak up some culture' and I was sitting on my bed trying desperately not to cry. I had three roommates, one a few years above me who went out of  her way to make my life miserable (and often succeeded) and two more in my year who were rather nice girls. However it was one of these nice girls who had asked the question. She had watched curiously as I'd turned up, halfway through the school year, dressed in white shorts and a t-shirt because the school uniform shop had been closed. She'd seen the emotional goodbye as my dad had left and sat quietly while my things were unpacked (and pawed over) in front of an audience by a senior girl assigned to the task by a matron. Everything had finally quieted down a bit, my sister was next door going through similar bouts of homesickness and I had resisted going to her because I knew that we'd both end up in a weeping heap. I was trying very hard to be brave and had been giving myself a pep talk in my head- telling myself that there was no need to be upset, that I wasn't alone and hadn't I always wanted to go to boarding school, that it would be just like Malory Towers and anyway this was boarding school in Nigeria where, for the first time in my life I wouldn't be the only black girl in the whole school and therefore  people would actually say my name right and I wouldn't have to answer silly questions like whether my skin colour rubbed off in the shower.

So, this question- why was I so black?- couldn't have shocked me more. I asked her to explain. As I saw it, we were both black? She said no then gestured to my arm. She was talking about the hue of my skin- I was at least 5 shades darker than her and she wanted to understand why I, coming from 'abroad', looked like that.

I was to hear that question many more times over the course of the next few years. I still hear slightly updated versions of it now. "Ah, you don't look the way you sound." "Even after all your years in obodo oyinbo, you haven't lightened up?" "Hmm, maybe they don't have the right creams over there- this is the one I use. Can't you see I don't look like I'm suffering anymore? You should buy some".

This is, of course, shadism i.e. the belief that being a lighter shade of black is better than the alternative. In its kindest form, it's expressed with pity. People think you would have been 'finer' if you were lighter or ask you if you feel 'somehow' going out with your light skinned friends, or whether it upsets you that your daughter is darker than you (that last one having been experienced by a friend of mine, to her fury). In its most common form, it's expressed via preferential treatment or compliments " Ahh, she is a very fine girl, very fine. She is yellow!" - yellow being the term Nigerians use to describe girls with lighter skin.. In its harshest form, having darker skin is viewed as some sort of disability. An unfortunate accident of birth you should really try to fix as soon as possible.

Shadism is a prejudice and I am willing to accept the expression of prejudices with no more than a shrug and resignation from older generations. We all let people of a certain age be a bit outrageous. We do it on the understanding that they don't know or weren't taught better, that they grew up in a time when the world was different, that those are old, outdated attitudes which will die out when they do. The rare times I've heard shadism from an older Nigerian, I have assumed it's because they think it's always winter overseas, that skin hue generally comes from prolonged exposure to the sun and- there being less of it over here- I simply ought to be lighter. Other times, their shadism has been expressed because they have heard me sound very English, perhaps over the phone, and have assumed that a fully Nigerian girl, who went to school in Nigeria for a while to boot, cannot sound like that. They, still bearing the sub-concious mental rhythms of colonialism, do not connect an English accent with dark skin. So they ask on the assumption that I must have some English in me somewhere and want an explanation for the way I look. It's amusing, sometimes quite sweet, and it has never really bothered me, in this form.

But when I hear and see shadism from people my age, people with similar educational experiences as me, people who have never lived in a colonised Nigeria- well, then it makes me furious.

I hear it from young black men, who make jokes about not finding 'dark skinned girls' attractive- one gentleman I followed on Twitter for his funny, clever tweets was once retweeted time and again for an entire day for making endless jokes about the sort of animals he'd rather have sex with than a dark skinned girl. Shocked I unfollowed him, and then had to log out for fear of losing my temper at the other funny, clever people who were cheering him on. "It's all jokes" they said, in their defence. But if a white  person had made the same jokes, these cheerleaders would have been up in arms at how 'racist' it all was.

I hear it from young black women, who wish to bleach their skin to achieve a lighter skin tone, who look down on dark girls.  On my first trip back to Nigeria after moving here, I invited my ex roommate over to stay with me. She turned up, looking a bit lighter than I'd remembered- she and I had been the same shade. But I put it down to better diet and skin care- no one looks their best in boarding school and I myself had had to put up with my sister's incessant nagging about how dull my eyes and skin  had been whilst I'd been at school there. But later that evening we were getting ready for bed and she asked how come I still looked the same. What did she mean? I was worried my healthy eating had made no difference and I still looked, as my sister put it "hungry". She said no, no, she meant my skin. I hadn't gotten much lighter. She showed me the cream she used, twice a day, that had caused her skin change and asked me why I hadn't started doing the same. When I explained that I quite liked my skin, thank you very much, and it hadn't held me back in the slightest, she looked at me with pity. Like I'd just turned down a perfectly sensible offer. She then said "Well, I guess maybe it's not a big deal over there.."

I hear it from people who should know better and choose not to, or people who are proud of their shadism and find the most twisted logic to support it. I've been told that being light skinned indicates wealth- which made me laugh. I've been told that being light skinned indicates cleverness- which made me laugh harder. I've been told that being light skinned indicates cleanliness- which made me a bit sad, being the sort of view medieval Europeans held. I've been told that being light skinned indicates that one is cultured, well traveled- what Nigerians like to call 'exposed'. That one just confused me, because faced with clear evidence of that being total bollocks, some shadists still stubbornly preach it as gospel.

Obviously, shadism has nothing to do with any of those things. Shadism is self hatred, pure and simple.

For African-Americans, shadism is just one of many racial scars caused by their particular historic experiences. It is still a form of self-hatred, but it comes from a real place, an easily accessible place. In it's most basic form, it's the remnant of the field vs. house slave dichotomy. If you were a lighter skinned slave, you usually got to work indoors or 'front of house'. Sometimes it meant you were the offspring of a (usually non consensual) relationship between a slave and a slave master and that often meant you had a better chance at being educated that your darker skinned counterparts. Racist white Americans saw more of themselves in lighter skinned African-Americans and treated them better. With race still being a hot topic in America, many tempered examples of this behaviour remain.

But modern day Nigerians were never slaves. Nigeria was colonised, yes, but apart from the political preference given to the tribes in the North and some of the tribes in the south west, there is no indication that light skinned Nigerians were ever treated better by the British than dark skinned ones. In fact, those preferences were generallly based on  ease of administration than skin colour. Indirect rule was easier to enforce in the North, the prevalence of Western Missionaries meant that some southern tribes were better educated and thus more able to rise under a colonised Nigeria than others. Some Northerners are light skinned due to their historical migration from North Africa and some southerners are genetically light skinned but I don't think anyone can say that light skin is a primary feature of any of those tribes. Nigeria cannot say shadism came from the effects of unfair colonial treatment- Nigeria is not Rwanda.

So, this must be a self inflicted racial scar. Somehow, Nigerians chose to practice shadism and I cannot for the life of me understand why. I can't even look to an historical importation of the African-American brand of shadism- the few freed slaves who returned to Nigeria to settle made up such a small proportion of the population, it would be ridiculous to lay this piece of nonsense at their feet. So where is it coming from? What is the source of this ridiculous demonisation of dark skin?


I've been reasonably sanguine in this rant so far, but I hope no one thinks I'm not furious about this. No, shadism, this disgusting piece of unjustifiable self hatred, fills me with incandescent rage. I'm not cross simply because I myself am dark skinned, although I'm not high minded enough to pretend that's not a factor, but because the people perpetuating shadism are so utterly without intelligence. There is no sense to it, it is self defeating, it is stupid. Most prejudices are, but, like the African American explanation given above, if you dig deep enough you can usually find its source. You may not like it, but you can draw a straight line from A to B.

I cannot do that with this Nigerian disdain of dark skin. I genuinely want to know- have Nigerians always been shadists? Is there some traditional reason for lighter skin meaning something better? Did pre-colonial Nigerians have an indoor/outdoor, house/field mentality too? I've tried to find information on this, and I have failed. In my mother's time, in my grandmother's time, in the times before colonialism happened- were we still saying that dark was less than light? I asked my father, who has no real patience for any sort of aesthetic silliness and he first hissed then said- "Of course not! Your mother was dark and many men wanted to marry her. In fact many of the women from our place [our village] are always dark and in the olden days, warriors from other villages used to come and steal them away. They were known as being virtuous, good wives. It's you young people, always trying to be like the Americans..." He believes it's an imported prejudice, and, having failed to find any other explanation, I'm inclined to believe it too. We import everything else, why not a bit of racial stupidity.

Perhaps I should always have known that Nigerian shadism was self inflicted, voluntary self hatred- an expression of the popular Nigerian habit of venerating 'the West' in everything, rather than taking the good and using it to make Nigeria better. Perhaps the answer was always in the way Nigerians express shadism. As the opening line of this rant shows, Nigerians don't generally refer to dark skinned girls as dark skinned. That is a new, PC term that has crept into our vocabulary from African-American speech. When I was at school, I was never 'dark', I only started hearing that fairly recently. No, I was always  'black'. The word, which strictly applies to all Nigerians, means something different when used in a shadist way. Nigerians say it differently, for one thing. The word is  over emphasised, shadists add a certain vehemence to it. They draw out the vowel sounds and the consonants become hyper-percussive. They want you to know they're making a very particular distinction- they're not talking about the simple fact that this person is not white, or Asian, or Latino or anything else. They're not saying you're black, they're saying you're 'blaaaaack'.

They're saying that your darker skin diminshes you somehow, makes you less exotic, less cultured, less attractive, less wealthy, less 'exposed'. If you're 'blacker' than, you're less than.


And, before you think I cannot tell the difference, I should say that shadism, what I'm ranting about, is not a matter of simple preference. Shadism is a prejudice and saying otherwise is disingenuous and/or naive. People have 'types', people they're attracted to sometimes without even knowing why, exactly. You might have a thing for height or smiles or elegant fingers. But there are two things that separate a harmless preference from a prejudice- how it's expressed and who it affects.

Some people like one thing better than another and manage to express that in a way that is respectful and considerate and fair. You can tell that shadism is not a matter of preference by listening to the language used. You can say that you find French men sexy, that you like the way Igbo women tend to have long, gorgeous hair, that you have a weakness for that particular brand of 'swagger' that comes so easily to Yoruba men, that like me, pre-war BBC accents are devilishly attractive. Nowhere in those statements is there a comparison, a placing of X over Y and that's the language of harmless preference.  Language is important and the language used by people who practice this foolish shadism is never considerate or fair. It is always derogatory, always using words like 'hate' or 'ugly'. It's always harsh and almost angry, dismissive. It's always divisive. A shadist will never say "I find women with lighter skin beautiful" without finding a way to say that women with darker skin are ugly. If shadism was a preference, we wouldn't have the jokes, the comparison of dark skinned girls to animals. We all have our types and having a type that happens to be different from the norm is not self hatred. If it was, some may accuse me of being the worst sort of self hater based on the fact that I date more white men than black men. But that's not at all the same- I don't think black men are less attractive or less clever or less wonderful and you'll never hear me say so. My white boyfriends happened largely because of where I went to school and to a lesser degree because of choice- the way I live my life has often caused problems with Nigerian men. I cannot deny also that my dark skin has never bothered a white man who was interested in me before but I've had some Nigerian men consider me less attractive because of it. And above all, I'd never not date someone simply because they are Nigerian. My preference, if it is indeed one, is entirely fluid.

These are the sorts of experiences that indicate a preference- acceptance, comfort, convenience, fluidity. Prejudice is rarely convenient or comfortable to maintain and it is never willing to be fluid. Shadists know that there are probably more dark Nigerian women than light, that becoming lighter skinned can be harmful to your skin, or at the least will require months if not years of a strict regimen. There is nothing comfortable or convenient about being a shadist. Shadists aren't willing to look anywhere else but at what they like, fluidity is incomprehensible to them. No, shadism is a prejudice and it comes from places of anger and fear, from a feeling of superiority and superficiality.

And who does it affect? You prefer light over dark, in terms of physical attraction. Fine.Would you pray for light skinned children, or bleach your children's skin if your prayer isn't answered? Would you bleach your own skin to become what you prefer? No. You only do that if you're shadist, if your preference is in fact a prejudice. You do it because you're worried you'll be viewed as less than, that your children will carry the same burden. A harmless, physical preference doesn't affect the very young, or how we see ourselves, unless it's unhealthy or an objective bad (e.g. weight or education) Only prejudices do that- and I'd like to see the moron who can tell me that being dark skinned is unhealthy or an objective bad.

Here's another reason why shadism is self hatred. My besties are both light skinned. One is extremely light, so much so that with certain hair weaves she is usually assumed to Arab or Indian. The other is a bit darker. Both have heard time and again that 'they do not look Nigerian'. Not just from non Nigerians, but from people with Nigerian blood as thick as theirs. Every light skinned girl I've ever met has had similar experiences. Now, if we tell light skinned girls that they do not look Nigerian because they are light skinned, doesn't that expose this shadism as self hatred? Isn't it just another way to distance ourselves from who we are? Isn't it utterly, unjustifiably foolish?

And like many prejudices, it hits the women the hardest. Men can be as dark as they like, no one cares. In fact, another import from America is that light skinned men are somehow weak, effeminate, less manly than their dark skinned counterparts. It's women who are constantly bombarded with the pressures of shadism. Some men bleach, but they pale in comparison to the legions of women who feel they must bleach. And yet the women don't say: look, this is bullshit. Some do, of course, but many carry on with their skin lightening regimens. Others, who don't quite want to be so drastic, pray for light skinned daughters.

I recently watched a music video by a Nigerian group Olu Maintain (or perhaps it's just one guy, I'm unsure) called NAWTI. The song is mostly in Yoruba, so I couldn't understand the lyrics, but I assumed that it was about 'naughty' girls and the band had just spelt it in a silly way. Most of the video confirmed this; it was the usual bling and booty video, shot on location in LA, with girls in underwear and high heels and skimpy dresses. Then, about 60% in, an acronym flashed across the skin that floored me. NAWTI actually stood for Natural African Woman Totally Inspiring. Huh. The main model in the video was a pseudo celebrity called Natalie Nunn- a light skinned African American woman. The rest of the video models were largely light skinned and at least one was Asian. They were all beautiful, of course, but it just struck me as utterly insane that with an acronym like that Olu Maintain couldn't find more dark skinned girls to be in their video.

Please don't misunderstand- I think women of every hue are gorgeous, and I'm NOT insinuating in any way that in a video about African women, only dark skinned girls are welcome. That is a nonsense. Nor am I saying that the preference of dark skin over light skin is any better, I'm just asking myself, why do we do the opposite? Why did Olu Maintain think that their viewers would only be 'totally inspired' by 'natural african women' if they were light skinned? Worse, why will many of his viewers prove him right?

To make matters even more infuriatingly dumb, shadism can backfire. A  few months ago, my sister was visiting from Nigeria and her friend came down to stay with us in my flat for a few days. One night over dinner, she was telling us about a friend of hers who had recently bleached her skin. My sister and I expressed the usual noises of disgust over it, but her friend hastened to inform us that this girl's results were "clean". No skin burns, no "Fanta face Coke body". Just clear, even skin about 3 shades lighter than her 'birth colour'. Skin bleaching, it seemed, had improved. Now, companies were producing purely natural skin lighteners that could get the job done without the use of harmful toxins and carcinogens. I asked her that, in light of the removal of the health concerns, would she ever bleach her skin? (She is about as dark as me, maybe a tad lighter.) She said no. I asked why, surprised, as she had seemed rather impressed by the successful bleaching story. She said because in Nigeria, light skinned girls like that often attracted too much, or the wrong sort, of attention. Wealthy men, often older and already married, liked having a light skinned girl on their arm. Ministers, senators, businessmen...they all viewed light skinned women as a sort of accessory. A validation of their success. What she called 'ordinary' guys, who were looking for something serious, tended to go for darker skinned girls. They were the ones you married, the light skinned girls were the ones you kept on the side. Dark skinned girls were 'down to earth', light skinned girls with long weaves were 'aristo babes' i.e. women who only dated older wealthy men for their money.

I was shocked by this, having never heard it before. It also made me even more baffled at the shadism stupidity- if this was true, and light skinned women had now become the 'dumb blondes' of Nigeria, why were clever, intelligent, beautiful dark women wanting to hop on the bandwagon?

Shadism is one of the greatest pieces of nonsense I've ever come across and all I can hope for is that it dies a swift, painful death as soon as possible. Sadly, like most prejudices, that's not going to happen without one heck of a fight. Hopefully this is a drop in the ocean of outrage that gets that fight started.


*I don't know if this phenomenon has been termed "shadism" before now; I think I may have been the first to do so. If I'm right about that, (a) that's awesome and (b) does this mean I can have a Wikipedia page now?*

*Update: Sadly a clever person has already coined shadism, according my just-as-clever readers. The search for Wikipedia fame continues.*