The Future of American Blackness: On Colorism and Racial Reorganization

Abstract

This manuscript leverages the plethora of research on colorism and skin tone stratification among Black Americans to consider how the “Black” racial category may change going forward. I build on ideas about path dependence, racial and ethnic boundary formations, racial reorganization, and a case study on race and body size to explore how extant group-level differences in social outcomes and emerging differences in political attitudes between lighter skinned and darker skinned Black Americans may lead to a schism between the two groups that forces us to question what it means to identify or be identified as “Black.” The idea that “Black is Black” has become thoroughly engrained in the American imagination, facilitated by the history of “one-drop rules” and encouraged by racial segregation. This drives our racial categorization and fuels resistance to many public discussions of colorism. However, we may have reached an even more important crossroads in our examination of colorism that forces us to reckon with the question “what is a racial group?”