What is it about?
This article examines colorism, a system that privileges lighter skin over darker skin, as a lasting psychological and social legacy of colonialism. Drawing on a transnational dialogue between Black women scholars in the United States and South Africa, the authors show how colorism developed through slavery, apartheid, and colonial rule, and how it continues to shape mental health, relationships, education, and economic opportunities today. The article is grounded in two research projects led by the authors. One is the BlackGIRL Project, a critical participatory action research study that examines how Black girls in the United States experience, internalize, and resist colorism in their everyday lives. The second is a qualitative study conducted in South Africa that explores how women understand and navigate colorism within the context of apartheid’s legacy and contemporary social life. By blending psychological research, historical analysis, community-based studies, and personal narratives, the article illustrates how colorism is embodied, transmitted across generations, and actively resisted. Framing colorism as a “colonial deposit,” the authors argue that it cannot be understood or addressed without confronting colonial histories, gendered racism, and global systems of inequality.
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Why is it important?
Colorism is widely experienced but is often theorized in psychology through narrow, context-bound or individual-level frameworks rather than examined as a transnational colonial structure. This article approaches colorism as a shared colonial inheritance that takes distinct forms across settings while remaining rooted in common structures of colonialism, racial hierarchy, and political economy. By integrating decolonial theory, Black feminist psychology, and participatory research, the work moves beyond individual or interpersonal explanations and situates colorism within histories of power, embodiment, and global inequality. The analysis highlights how colorism is both universal in its origins and deeply contextual in its expression, with implications for psychological research, clinical practice, education, and policy that call for collective, culturally grounded responses rather than individual-level fixes.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a true labor of love. It emerged from more than two years of collective thinking, crying, and writing. It began with an email from a mentor of mine, Michelle Fine, who wrote to say that she had met someone in South Africa studying colorism and thought we should talk. That initial conversation grew from a Zoom call into an ongoing process of reflexivity, deep critical historical analysis, and collective meaning-making across contexts. Writing this paper required sustained co-theorizing — not only among the authors, but also with our editors and reviewers, whose engagement pushed the work to be sharper, braver, and more accountable. The process asked us to sit with discomfort, revisit histories, and resist easy conclusions. This work is also deeply personal. Throughout the article, we share stories drawn from our own childhoods, from aunties, and especially from our grandmothers. These narratives are not add-ons to the scholarship; they are central to how we understand colorism as something that lives in bodies, families, and memories. We hope this piece reflects both rigorous intellectual labor and deep care, and that readers can feel the intention with which we carried the weight of this process.
Gina Sissoko
Yale University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Colonial deposits: A transnational dialogue exploring historic and contemporary embodiments of colorism., American Psychologist, November 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/amp0001570.
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