Booklist Review
Tharps (Kinky Gazpacho, 2008) confronts colorism, a cousin to racism in its bias toward favoring African Americans who more closely resemble a white ideal with lighter skin, finer hair, and sharper facial features. She dispels colorism's most persistent myths, that it arose solely out of divisions of labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, and that it is a prejudice inherent only in the African American community. Tharps, a journalist, presents ignored racial history; arresting statistics; and compelling, sometimes heartbreaking, anecdotes shared by people from across a wide spectrum of races and skin color to show that no group is immune to colorism's pernicious effects, whether it's African American, Latino, Asian American, white, or a biracial combination of these. This is a landmark investigation into the cultural and social aspects of colorism on both the American landscape and the global community.--Hawkins, Valerie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN DANZY SENNA'S 1998 novel "Caucasia," two sisters - Cole and Birdie - share a bond so intimate that they create a language only they can understand. Engulfed in the racial chaos of Boston in the mid-70s, the sisters nestle themselves away in the cozy world they have created in their attic bedroom. Their lives are forever changed when their mother, a liberal white New Englander, and their father, a black man with radical political leanings, decide to divorce. The sisters are divided: Birdie lives with her mother and essentially passes for white, while Cole, who looks black, moves in with her father and his black girlfriend. In a city as racially divided and explosive as Boston in the 1970s, this separation by skin color strikes the reader as a chillingly rational decision. Forty years later, America is no longer the bipolar racial regime of black and white that set Birdie and Cole on such different paths. Not only have personal attitudes changed, but the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 - which upended American immigration policy by abolishing the quota system based on national origins - has also transformed the country's demographic character. The landmark Loving v. Virginia case of 1967 prohibited legal restrictions on interracial marriages. Federal racial classifications now recognize mixed-race identities. But neither Cole nor Birdie would have been widely understood as mixed-race in the 1970s. As Danzy Senna, who is mixed-race, has written of her own experiences during that tumultuous decade: "Mixed wasn't an option. . . . No halvsies. No in between." Lori L. Tharps's new book, "Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America's Diverse Families," is an urgent and honest unveiling of how generations of American families have lived with these changes. Tharps focuses on "colorism," which she notes is not an official word, but has been defined by Alice Walker as "prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color." Most of the book discusses the preferential treatment that has been reserved for light-skinned African-Americans, but Tharps, a j ournalist, also includes chapters on Latino and Asian-American families. She makes the claim that treating lighter-skinned people more favorably is a worldwide problem, not just one that was developed in the United States. To solve it, everyone must recognize his or her part in perpetuating it. As Tharps writes, "For every African-American girl hiding from the sun under her mother's strict orders, there is a Korean-American girl playing in the shadows as well." With great sensitivity and unapologetic boldness, Tharps skillfully weaves the rich historical context of the United States, the Americas and Asia with wrenching contemporary first-person accounts to investigate how color operates in the most intimate spaces of American families. Relying on numerous interviews of parents and children with a wide range of skin colors, Tharps proves the quotation by the social scientist Frank Sulloway to be painfully true: "No social injustice is felt more deeply than that suffered within one's own family." "Same Family, Different Colors" begins with Tharps's story of marrying a man from the south of Spain whom she met during her junior year of college, while she was studying near Madrid. Tharps describes her husband as having a "milky-white complexion" and describes herself as having medium-brown skin that easily darkens in the sun. Their three children represent a broad range in skin color, from, borrowing Tharps's descriptions, "the color of cinnamon" to "beige" to "warm almond," yet two could pass for white. While Tharps and her husband were not concerned with these differences, they found that people all around them were noticing that there was something unusual about their family - the neighborhood dry cleaner, a 5-year-old playing an innocent game of "I Spy" ("I spy something white!" the girl exclaimed, pointing to Tharps's daughter), the Brooklynites who assumed that Tharps was her son's nanny. Tharps soon faced the reality that our identities are rarely our own. She was constantly seeing herself, her husband and her children through the eyes of others. Mixed-race families like Tharps's often find themselves open to public scrutiny. The lack of phenotypical uniformity that many people expect to be clearly visible led to stares, whispers and uncomfortable questions, including one about whether her son was adopted. Onlookers seemed to question the coherence of her family and to wonder whether they were a family at all. As Tharps writes: "Most of the time I try to ignore other people's issues with my children's skin color, but sometimes it really bothers me. And sometimes it just hurts." IT MAY COME as a surprise that often those who can be the most unkind are one's own family members. Tharps delicately but honestly presents the recollections of many people who were insulted - indeed, wounded - by family members mocking their darker skin. She also tells the stories of light-skinned individuals who felt isolated from their own families and communities because their skin color made them feel as though they did not fit in. Some parents prized their lightest child's beauty, while others paid more attention to their darker children, worried about the emotional consequences of societal beauty norms that would ignore or denigrate them. Some parents did not talk about color at all. The range of experiences that Tharps presents is wide and rich. In all but a few cases, skin color exerted considerable pressure on those of nonwhite backgrounds and played a profound role in shaping self-understanding and sense of personal value. Tharps reminds us that this problem is found not only in the United States: Latin America, East and South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa all grapple with colorism. It is an interracial and an intraracial problem. Studies have shown that white Americans often demonstrate preferential treatment of lighter-skinned blacks that leads to disparities in employment and hiring practices and in socioeconomic mobility. In Latin American countries, popular telenovelas focus on white-skinned Latinos and Latinas, correlating lighter skin with higher social class and casting darker-skinned actors to portray the roles of lower-class characters, including maids, gardeners and even criminals. In East and South Asian countries, the legacy of colonialism has led to the reverence of white skin and European features. The Bollywood movie industry in India prizes lighter-skinned actresses, sometimes even importing white actors to play Indian people. These ideas, planted in one's home country, become even more insidious in the United States. Observing that African-Americans were situated and largely stuck on the lowest rungs of the social, economic and political ladders, immigrants learned upon arriving in the United States that to succeed, one had to distance oneself as far as possible from blacks - despite the common oppression and common economic disadvantages that nonwhite groups shared. Progress on this front, given the long histories and the worldwide phenomenon of colorism, seems to occur only at a glacial pace. But we are already seeing the diversification of the black-white American racial binary, as well as cracks in the edifice of the "one-drop rule." Tharps ends on a hopeful note: Beliefs that parents with mixed-race children do not "match" are giving way to new ideas about the irrelevance of skin color to the composition of a loving family. We are on the front lines of a new racial order that has been a long time coming. People of all races and backgrounds deal with race each and every day in a multiplicity of ways. This thoughtful, honest, historically textured and valuable book offers a detailed and current syllabus of work on the social and cultural meanings of colorism around the world and brings colorism "out of the closet," as Tharps writes. Most important, "Same Family, Different Colors" makes clear that we are all implicated in how just and inclusive that new order will be. ALLYSON HOBBS is a history professor at Stanford University and the author of "A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life."
