Bill Duke Quotes

There's one disturbing notion throughout India that light skin is more attractive than dark.

In my country - even though we have a lot of dark-skinned people - people think the lighter you are, the better you are. They think beauty has to do with being light-skinned. I think that's really wrong.

The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.

I've experienced colorism in that way: where if you're lighter, then you'll potentially be accepted into society better than if you were darker-skinned.

The country has double standards - it's obsessed with fair skin on one hand, but if the woman is white, she is expected to be loose-moraled.

Since anti-racist individuals did not control mass media, the media became the primary tool that would be used and is still used to convince black viewers, and everyone else, of black inferiority.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Please do not think me terribly narrow, but Sinha is comparatively white, whilst Muckerji is black as my hat!

If you're white, You're all right. If you're brown, Stick around. But if you're black, Get back, get back.

When I started modeling, it was like, 'Oh, she's too dark,' and I kind of looked at them like, 'You're too daft.'

For black people who are really dark - and a lot of black people were averse to be dark skinned - it was believed that you'd be so dark that you couldn't see them at night unless they were smiling or you could see the whites of their eyes. At one time, it was a sharp comic barb that got levelled at some people.

My complexion, we too gutter: light-skinned women are more sensitive.

There's this issue where I'm really doing well and got hate 'cause I'm too light-skinned. I understand why people say that - throughout history, the lighter you are, that's how it's been. But it's not my fault. My mom and dad had me! I look how I look.

Light-skinned women, we can break them down more easy.

You will never see me in an ad for fairness creams. I think its outrageous that, even in this day and age, there are products that urge people to be fair or that their luck depends on the colour of their skin.

I can only say that sometimes skin colour does make a difference.

Mariah Carey, Rihanna, the female rapper Nicki Minaj, my kids - and what do they all have in common? They're all lighter skinned. Do you think that's an accident?

Yes colorism does exist if you look at historically what's happened as far as crossing over to pop radio.

I think the obsession with fair skin should end.

There are so many people that don't come in contact with black men. Whether they live in a homogeneous area that's mostly white or whether they live in places where they don't have to come in contact with them. So what kind of contact do they have with African-American males? They have the media, and that's it.

When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.

You don't really see ugly people that are old, or a bit grotty and smelly, in the media. If a Martian came down, they would think we were all tall, thin, attractive and wealthy.

She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

Americans have their issues with skin colour, even within the black community, with light and dark skin; it's crazy - but no one's oblivious to it.

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.