We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

But I have traveled around the world and I know this to be true: there are assholes who wear natural hair, and assholes who wear weaves. Your hair is not going to determine or even influence what kind of person you are.

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.”

For years, we have advised women of color—light and dark—that the first step to healing is to acknowledge that colorism exists. Well, if we have hashtags about which teams people are on, black children staying out of the sun to avoid getting darker, and research studies that show the

darker your skin, the greater your economic disadvantage, then we know colorism is a fact. We’re ready for the next step, and we can’t shrink from it just because it’s hard and uncomfortable.

“And, by the way, you showed exactly how much power she has over you because you spent an hour talking about her to a roomful of people.”

The problem is, there’s always an audience for negativity.

Negativity and the exploitation of other people’s pain drive so much of our culture and conversation.

“An empress does not concern herself with the antics of fools.” She smiled, so I smiled. That kindness, one empress to another, one woman to another, released me from the bullshit.

A dog, safer from harm than black boy bodies.

At the end, we are our stories, some shared and some lived alone.