Black Is More Beautiful When People Think You’re Mixed

Being perceived as more attractive can provide an escape hatch from racial discrimination.

(Photos: Getty Images)

Aug 16, 2016· 2 MIN READ

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

Every day Campaign Zero founder and activist DeRay Mckesson posts an affirmation on Twitter: “I love my blackness. And yours.” But it seems that some Americans might have more love for a black person—or at least find the person more attractive—if they’re told that the individual isn’t completely black.

That’s the conclusion of research published in the June issue of The Review of Black Political Economy by Robert Reece, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Duke University. Reece analyzed 3,200 interviews of black people who participated in Add Health: The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which is directed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The interviewers, who were from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, were asked to rate the attractiveness of the participants. Reese found that the interviewers were more likely to say that black participants were attractive if the participants identified themselves as multiracial.

“I was surprised by how stark the difference is in the attractiveness ratings in multiracial black people compared to monoracial black people,” Reece told TakePart. “These results reveal that even the darkest-skinned multiracial black people have higher attractiveness ratings on average than the lightest-skinned monoracial black people. I never expected that to be the case.”

Research on colorism consistently shows that lighter-skinned black people are viewed as more attractive and receive significant social benefits—they are more likely to be hired for jobs than their darker-skinned peers and are more likely to receive lenient prison sentences. At a time when black people, regardless of skin tone, may also decide to whiten their résumé by changing their name or removing leadership roles in black-affiliated organizations to get job interviews, Reece’s research suggests there may be additional societal benefits to saying that you’re only part black—whether or not it’s true.

“The pressure has always been there to distance yourself from blackness whenever you get the opportunity,” Reece said. “For some people, saying that they’re part of something else is a way of surviving racism. One of the papers I cite in my research is an ethnography of a strip club. The women learned that they would make more money if they told the patrons that they were multiracial.”

There is historical precedent for that. Reece said research shows that in the late 19th century, people would change their identification on the U.S. Census, switching between black and mulatto, the category for people who were half black and half white. “It was an official racial category on the census, but people would move in and out of the mulatto category. From census to census, sometimes people would be black, and sometimes they’d be a mulatto, based on their social circumstances in between,” he said.

Reece’s research comes at a time when the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic is popular on social media, and Mckesson’s daily affirmation gets retweeted hundreds of times. But Reece cautions that the results aren’t “necessarily about how we feel about blackness as much as how we are perceived relative to society’s social standards of attractiveness.”

Instead, they are another reminder of how critical it is “to be aware of the complexity of the contours of race in our society—how complicated it is and how it’s shaping the ways that we’re perceived and the ways that we live our lives,” Reece said. “We know a lot about race, and we can be sure in many cases that racism is operating even if we don’t know exactly how.”

Being aware of these types of biases “certainly won’t fix our race problem,” Reece said. “But if we know that we have a tendency to treat people who say they are multiracial as more attractive, that allows us to make a deliberate effort to treat everyone equally.”