A recent study of women convicted of crimes shows that dark-complexioned blacks serve more time in jail.
There are advantages to being a light-skinned black person in the United States.
Research on those advantages isn't new, but with the release of a recent study by Villanova University, the breadth of quantitative studies that examine colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone, continues to increase. From housing opportunities to employment chances to which women have a good shot at getting married, the lighter-is-better dynamic is at play, research shows.
Villanova researchers studied more than 12,000 cases of African-American women imprisoned in North Carolina and found that women with lighter skin tones received more-lenient sentences and served less time than women with darker skin tones.
The researchers found that light-skinned women were sentenced to approximately 12 percent less time behind bars than their darker-skinned counterparts. Women with light skin also served 11 percent less time than darker women.
Racism gets all the headlines, but colorism is just as real and impacting, Hannon explains. How "white" someone is perceived matters. "Colorism is clearly not taken as seriously or is not publicly discussed as much as racism, and yet these effects are pretty strong and the evidence is pretty strong," he says. "It's a very real problem, and people need to pay attention to it more."
Christina Swarns, director of the Criminal Justice Practice for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says the study's findings are part of a larger problem in how the justice system deals with African Americans. "It is obviously part and parcel of the problem of overincarceration of the African-American community in this country," she says. "There is unquestionably ... an association between race and criminality, and I think this study emphasizes how skin color plays an important role in that perception of a link between race and criminality."
Link: http://www.theroot.com/views/lighter-skin-shorter-prison-term