We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

For decades, sociologists like Margaret Hunter have collected real empirical evidence that we are color struck. Darker-skinned people face a subset of racial inequalities related to discipline at school, employment, and access to more affluent neighborhoods. In one study, Hunter found that a lighter-skinned woman earned, on average, twenty-six hundred dollars more a year than her darker sister. In her 2002 study of the color stratification of women, Hunter also presented real statistical evidence showing that light-skinned African American women had “a clear advantage in the marriage market and were more likely to marry high-status men than were darker-skinned women.”