In the wake of Sen. Harry Reid's reference to President Obama as a "light-skinned" African-American, Shankar Vedantam reports on "colorism, an unconscious prejudice that isn't focused on a single group like blacks so much as on blackness itself. Our brains, shaped by culture and history, create intricate caste hierarchies that privilege those who are physically and culturally whiter and punish those who are darker." Vedantam notes an experiment conducted in the fall of 2008 in which persons were shown a political ad supporting Obama; one version of the ad showed a light-skinned black family, the other a dark-skinned black family. Those who viewed the ad were less inclined to vote for Obama after watching the dark-skinned family ad than were those who viewed the light-skinned family.
I previously wrote on colorism and employment discrimination in The Color Complex: Intraracial Discrimination in the Workplace, 46 Labor Law Journal 678 (1995).
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