Tonight, Oprah Winfrey’s OWN channel will air the second of Bill Duke’s documentaries on colorism. As a follow-up to Dark Girls, Light Girls takes a look at colorism from the perspective of light-skinned women. One celebrity sharing her story about how colorism affected her life is the estranged wife of Wiz Khalifa, model Amber Rose.
Rose, who separated from Khalifa last year, spoke about how some of her family didn’t attend her wedding because she married a black man. Rose, who has a Cape Verdean-and-Portuguese mother and an Italian father, explained that some of her older family members still have issues about light skin and perceive it as something of a luxury that makes them “better” than dark-skinned people.
“With my family, they feel like they’re more superior or better than an African American because we’re Creole and we have culture, and that’s something I battle with most of my life," she explained in a sneak peek. “It’s more of the older people in my family.”
Rose went on to say that the fact that so many of her family members didn’t attend her wedding in 2013 still hurts her to this day. “It’s such a sensitive subject that it’s hard to explain yourself without sounding mean or bitter or angry, but I am,” she shared. “I’m angry that my family is like that and they want to pass so bad that they raise my mom and my uncles and my aunts to not fully know their culture.”
She added, “Our younger generation, we’ve embraced it so much, and I feel like that’s why my father is white.”
I’m going to assume that when she said “that’s why my father is white,” she’s speaking of her mother wanting to have lighter-skinned children so that they’d be able to pass easier. It’s sad that these issues that her family have may even find their way to her son, who is a beautiful, brown-skinned baby.
Light Girls premieres tonight at 9 p.m. EST on OWN.