Colourism: prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.
As you may know I grew up in Italy. I don't look like the typical Italian, but I do identify as Italian. The friends and acquaintances that I was used to have around when I was little were mainly Caucasian. I've had very little episodes of racism and discrimination, little to none. I was lucky.
I am a black person, not too dark and not too light. I know that my skin shade can help me out in certain situations were a person darker than me would suffer more injustices.
Wanting to deepen my understanding about the experiences and struggles of darker black people, I bought a ticket for the screening of the docufilm "No Shade" by Clare Anyiam-Osigwe.
This refreshing film was screened at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. No place was a better choice than this. It was a fairly warm day. Thankfully I do live in South West London, not too far from Brixton so I didn't have to travel too long to reach my destination. Once I made it to the venue, I noticed that there was already a queue of adult black women with their tickets ready. While glimpsing at each other, we shared a brief welcoming nod of the head or smile. Once the tickets were checked, we reached the actual viewing room upstairs were Clare was patiently waiting. The seats were nearly all taken. I made my way to a corner of the room and had a look around. There were different styles, skin shades and sizes of women. I saw people much older and much younger than me already sitting there. I loved the diversity of the audience.
The story of the movie is very simple: "Jade, a successful freelance photographer is hopelessly in love with her best friend of 10 years, bar manager Danny. She discovers through several challenging encounters both personally and professionally that the one thing keeping them from happy ever after is her inherent beauty - her complexion and skin tone. Her shade."
This film was the first production of dermatologist and filmmaker Clare Anyiam-Osigwe, a fearless and talented black woman that I had the pleasure to collaborate with few years ago. The story of Jade is loosely based on experiences and encounters that Clare had when she was younger. Few times during the screening there were some outbursts from the public as a reaction of what was seen or said on the screen and I couldn't help but giggle.
I'm pretty sure I had a similar experience while watching "Black Panther", were the majority of the audience was black and sometimes you could hear the funny commentary from somebody sitting at the far back. Black people just makes everything funnier!
After the screening, as audience had the chance to ask questions to the film maker and writer Clare and the two main protagonists, Adele Oni and Kadeem Pearse.
I had the pleasure to listen to structured and very intelligent answers on colourism, skin bleaching, interracial dating, self doubt and black family dynamics.
Everybody was represented in this movie and that's what I loved most.
I think the movie was brilliant. Just the topic of this movie was fresh and hardly spoke about in every day filmography. We all know somebody who has a problem with their skin, probably because of bullying and self doubt but we do need more films like "No Shade" to start talking about this topics in order to HEAL and MOVE ON.
Bravo Clare!
#SupportBlackBusinesses #NoShadeFilm
