I hope this thread isn’t found sketchy-- definitely not my intent. But it’s often been observed that while the population of normal Americans runs a wide gamut of skin tones, because of racist beauty standards, black celebrities tend much more often to be more towards the milkier side of the complexion spectrum. I’m trying to think of which celebrities have skin tones more on the darker end of variation, and I’m having quite a hard time of it. My brief mental skim suggests that the cultural block against darker-skinned people attaining celebrity is very real. But now I’m putting it to y’all.
I’m going to tentatively say athletes don’t count, because I don’t think their appearance (beyond actual physical fitness) is considered as crucial to their careers as it is for actors, musicians, and politicians. Feel free to prove me wrong, though.
Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, and Bill Cosby? They aren’t particularly dark at all. From some of the choices here, it looks like people are (perhaps subconsciously) choosing people with strong African features, some of which have non-dark (for black folks, that is) skin tones.
How sad that the image above is from Beauty Shop. He’s had some good meaty roles. His characters in Amistad and The Four Feathers foremost. And he was pretty badass in the popcorn flick The Island.
Deciding to look into politics, because I haven’t seen a picture of him in quite a while, I checked out Barack Obama but he’s not that dark-looking…there, anyway.
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