Today and yesterday quite a few men on Twitter took to “trolling” while adding the caption “imagine if she was light skinned tho” followed by a picture of a dark skinned women.

Thousands of retweets and mentions later, people still had some mixed feelings about the comment. Some stated that they agree with the statement and called it a preference, and others called it internalized racism.

Suzanne Lipsky, a published African American studies author, states that internalized racism is the

personal conscious or subconscious acceptance of the dominant society’s racist views, stereotypes and biases of one’s ethnic group. It gives rise to patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that result in discriminating, minimizing, criticizing, finding fault, invalidating, and hating oneself while simultaneously valuing the dominant culture.

So imagine if she was lighter, what would that mean for us as a society?

It means that we would revert back to the paper bag system. Hundreds of years ago whe America still had slavery, we would determine who was a house slave or a field slave by how they matched the color of a paper bag. If they were lighter than the paper bag, they would be in the house. If they were darker, they would be in the field.

Reverting back to the standards of shades means that racism is still alive and prosperous and is now being internalized in the black youth. Now a days if you are black you can’t be dark skinned because that is unattractive to the men and women.

As the tweets still come about with this photo and many others, we are forced to question our “preferences” and see if we too suffer from internalized racism.