Sitting in a circle with her family, Maylie Macias ’26 draws a card in Lotería, a Mexican board game similar to Bingo. The card depicts a black man as an entertainer, with the name “El Negrito.” After reading out the name, her family members all turn to point at her aunt, one of the darker-skinned members of the family. As her family jeers at her aunt, Macias sits in silence, acutely aware of the blatant colorism that is playing out in front of her. Macias said colorism is a result of persistent colonial beliefs that trickle down into everyday life.

“Colorism [manifests] through families and parents teaching their kids through small microaggressions like ‘don’t go in the sun’ or the comments about the Lotería cards, ” Macias said. “It’s the small stuff that gets ingrained in us about seeing Spanish genes and Spanish culture as more superior because our Indigenous ancestors were wiped out by them. If we want to equate ourselves to something bigger than ourselves and something victorious, we usually equate that to the Spanish DNA.”

Colorism is defined as prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color, according to Pulitzer Prize Winner Alice Walker, who coined the term in 1982. Upper School History Teacher Erik Wade said colonial history directly impacts the elevation of fair skin in certain cultures.

“Prehistory will show that different color tones were embraced, but that completely changes when we get to colonization by European nations,” Wade said. “Once there is contact with Europe, European beauty standards essentially dominate and their expectations become a part of the hegemonic presence.”

Black Leadership Awareness and Culture Club (BLACC) Leader Morgan McGinnis ’27 said the treatment of darker-skinned women as a result of colorism has impacted her self-worth.

“Socially, darker-skinned women are not treated as well as lighter-skinned women,” McGinnis said. “It really diminishes and damages my confidence as a [darker-skinned] Black girl because it’s horrible to feel like I will never be pretty enough because I’m not lighter. For me, there was a moment of realization when I was little that no matter what I did, I would never be the ideal woman. It totally decimates you and it’s just the worst feeling in the world to know that because of your skin color, you will never be seen as beautiful enough.”

Wade said he has experienced certain privileges due to being fairer-skinned within the black community.

“More than anything, I receive the benefits of being a little fair-skinned within the black community,” Wade said. “During a [National Association for the advancement of Colored People (NAACP)] student union meeting at our university, we were having conversations about colorism. At one point, my best friend turns around in the seat to point at me and he says ‘You’re part of the problem because you are lighter skinned and I’m not.’ I had the privilege of not having to think about my skin color, so I unconsciously benefit a lot more than darker-hued people do.”

An analysis of three major facial recognition programs showed a 0.8% error rate when prompted to identify the gender of a light-skinned man, compared to a 34.7% error rate for dark-skinned women, according to a study conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) African-American and Gender Studies Professor Dr. Safiya Noble said social media draws from preexisting hierarchies and ingrained beauty norms to promote content.

“The most common digital media platforms are advertising technologies, and they are optimized to draw attention to products, services, ideas and even propaganda,” Noble said. “We live with a long-entrenched dominant beauty standard based on the historically majority population, and algorithms are trained on data that is not inclusive of the rich ethnic and racial diversity of the American people. Machines ‘learn’ through repetitive optimization and normalization of the U.S. beauty standard, a standard that is mostly represented by lighter skin tones and European facial and body types and hair textures, perpetuating algorithmic colorism.”

As smartphone use has become increasingly ubiquitous, social media has become a primary source of pressure surrounding physical appearance in adolescents’ lives, according to a study cited in the Cambridge Press. Chinese-American student Hannah Yang ’28 said colorism is currently perpetuated more through digital content online than traditional familial pressure.

“Colorism mostly permeates through the media, whether it be through advertising or celebrities,” Yang said. “It’s less of parents telling their kids that they need to get paler and more of young people seeing these things on their phones and their computers and conforming to that on their own.”

Within the entertainment industry, the number of onscreen portrayals of white perpetrators of crime were found to be similar to that of Black people on television, despite white people constituting a larger portion of the population, according to a study conducted by the NIH. Macias said stereotypical depictions of darker skin colors on television shaped colorist perceptions within Latin America.

“Growing up, a lot of the movies that I saw that had people of color in them were gang stories and stuff about being from ‘the hood’ and bad neighborhoods of LA,” Macias said. “Those darker skin tones were then related to being ghetto and not being a good representation of your culture. That’s definitely part of why there’s a culture within Latin American communities, like Dominicans, to position themselves to be as far away from Black as possible.”

In the 1920s, tanned skin became an emblem of wealth and leisure after Coco Chanel popularized the look while vacationing on the French Riviera. However, by the 1990s, awareness about the health risks associated with tanning grew, leading to a decline in tanning during the 2010s before its recent resurgence through social media, according to Vogue Magazine. SASA leader Mylo Patel ’27 said the renewed popularity of tanning trends can have contradictory implications for those with darker skin.

“Tanning can be both a good thing and problematic at the same time,” Patel said. “Golden brown skin has always been a trend, starting in the 1900s with the popularity of suntanning and the creation of that ideal to aspire to. Nowadays, while I’m grateful that my skin is perceived as beautiful where it was previously seen as inferior and is becoming more accepted, I still find it odd that people change their skin tone to make it something they weren’t born with.”

Noble said modern social media algorithms have been trained to reward the affluence associated with the ability to tan.

“In modern history, tanning signals leisure time, access to vacations and warmer climates, especially in the winter, as opposed to working class or working-poor people, who might have to work or labor outdoors or in factories,” Noble said. “In more recent times, tanning has been popularized as a status symbol of health and vitality, as part of the American beauty standard. Social media content, particularly that of influencers, often trades on these images as part of the American beauty standard that is based on affluence and access to vacations, luxury items and leisure time.”

McGinnis said the implications of tanning are extremely contradictory for women of color.

“It’s absurd how many light-skinned women tan, but then turn around and call darker-skinned women slurs or too dark,” McGinnis said. “It’s so twisted because their beauty standards are based on women of color, but they also don’t want to be women of color. They just cherry-pick parts of how we look and adopt it for convenience. Overall, it’s conflicting and confusing because it gives us women of color mixed signals about what is valued in society.”

Wade said the influence of colorist beauty standards extends beyond gender norms.

“A lot of times we think of correcting for beauty standards within the context of women, but men lighten their skin as well to feel more attractive or match the beauty standards,” Wade said. “Sammy Sosa, for example, who is of Afro-Dominican ancestry, bleached his skin to appear whiter after his career in baseball. It seems like he viewed his beautiful, brown skin as something that needed to be changed, and he had the money to do it.”

The term “blackfishing” was coined by journalist Wanna Thompson in 2018, who described it as when white public figures do everything in their power to appear Black by tanning their skin excessively in an attempt to achieve ambiguity and wearing hairstyles and clothing trends that have been pioneered by Black women, according to CNN. Patel said tanning to replicate certain skin tones is problematic, but that he is open to the practice as long as the desire to tan comes from a good place.

“Tanning can be a euphemism for potential racial targeting when people try to transition racial boundaries with the way they darken themselves,” Patel said. “Especially in a place like L.A. where there are many people with darker complexions, it can be questionable, but as long as it’s coming from a good place of heart, I can try to understand. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt because we have a tendency nowadays to label things when people might be trying to enjoy something in their own right. However, I still think it’s important to be cautious because it’s a fine line.”

Using data from the National Institutes of a Health (NIH), a 10% increase in income increases tanning bed usage by 8.23%, according to an article in the Journal for Applied Economics. Yang said while pale skin used to be a marker of the upper class, the trend has shifted as tanned skin is equated with more privilege.

“In the past, rich people or those who were of a higher class had more opportunities to stay indoors,” Yang said. “Their duties never took place outside, which is why they remained pale and why fair skin became a marker for your social standing. Now, in Western countries, there’s a new trend towards tanning among the upper class because they have the leisure time to tan outside for long periods of time.”

50% of female respondents said lighter skin makes women look younger, wealthier, or more professional and were more likely to use skin lightening products than women who did not share the same association, according to a study conducted by Columbia University. McGinnis said colorism is still extremely entrenched because of the negative association that has been attached to darker skin.

“Colorism is still so pervasive because of how entrenched it is across multiple communities,” McGinnis said. “It’s so ingrained that it will take a long time before we make the necessary reparations to move forward and truly progress. The myth that lighter is more beautiful was and continues to be deeply rooted in the minds of the older generation, who have passed it down to newer generations.”

Macias said eradicating colorism requires addressing the root cause of harmful beauty standards.

“Amending colorism starts with redefining what we consider beautiful,” Macias said. “Once we separate that from whiteness and European beauty standards, then I think we start to shift culture. When comments are made, you have to actually stand up and say something. When I was little, I didn’t understand what my family was saying about my aunt, but now that I’m older, I can point it out and say, ‘Hey, that’s not right.’”

This story was originally published on The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle on February 4, 2026.