If you did not get the chance to catch OWN’s premier of “Light Girls” last week, the continuation of the original “Dark Girls” documentary, you missed out on a significant program. It was significant for several reasons, yet in my opinion, the documentary was unsuccessful in reaching its overall goal.
Black Twitter was in an uproar from the first minute of the documentary until the very last second. Immediately, the war via twitter escalated into “light-skinned twitter” verses “dark-skinned twitter”. It was honestly one of the most disturbing nights for the black race on social media that I have witnessed. Some of the topics tackled on the show were the likeliness of light-skinned girls being chosen as victims for rape before dark-skinned girls, skin-bleaching, and the issues they face keeping friends who do not look like them. Before the show could even pass the first five minutes, the intraracism became more apparent. I took this time to observe.
I noticed that many of the young women on my timeline who considered themselves “dark-skinned” took offense to the documentary. The main argument was, “What do light-skinned girls have to deal with?” As African-American women, generally, we are a socially oppressed people due to hyper-sexualized media and the perpetuation of Jim Crow’s brainwashing. The color of our skin does not matter to any other race except our own, which was also proven in the documentary. Both “Light Girls” and “Dark Girls” were clearly set out to give insight about stereotypes, yet they accomplished nearly nothing but further separation.
OWN’s documentaries can almost be considered more of a modern-day “Paper Bag Test”. Personally, I was not sure which documentary I could mostly identify with. When putting my arm up against the television to compare my skin tone to those being documented, I discovered that I was “too dark” to be considered a light girl, and “too light” to be considered a dark girl. I wondered, “Where do I belong?” Thankfully, I know that it does not matter, but it is very clear to see that OWN made a mistake. Instead of documentaries turning the black race against each other at such an imperative time, OWN should have simply created “Black Girls”. Love yourselves no matter what ladies!