There’s so much talk in our community when it comes to Colorism where BM are seen as perpetuators of colorism and BW are innocent bystanders being affected by it.
Two people standing in the rain will get wet. That is how internalized racism, colorism, and related pathologies work. People often talk as if these forces only damage the person directly targeted, but the poison spreads across the whole environment. The one demeaned is harmed by degradation, while the one doing the degrading is also warped by the values, fears, and false hierarchies they carry. This doesn’t magically shift because of gender. People were both conditioned to believe in it. When a community stands under the same storm, nobody stays dry. The damage may land differently, but it never stays on just one side.
People keep trying to rewrite a shared social pathology into a one-sided moral drama, as though only one group absorbed it, reproduced it, or enforced it. But when an entire community is raised under the same storm of racism, everybody is touched by it.
