“You laugh at it as a joke, but it’s not funny:” Young People’s Experiences of Colourist Banter
Waterloo Bridge Wing, Franklin Wilkins Building, Waterloo Campus, London
Colourism is a form of prejudice that penalises people the darker their skin is and the further their features are from those associated with whiteness. This paper explores how young people in the UK use jokes and banter to perpetuate colourism, particularly targeting those with dark and very dark skin. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with minoritised ethnic students aged 13-18 years in London and Bristol, we argue that colourist jokes and banter are often presented as harmless fun, however, they reproduce racist and colourist tropes, which can be dehumanising. For example, Black students with dark skin are sometimes likened to primates, which is animalistic dehumanisation. We argue that colourist jokes are used to mark and test the boundaries of friendships and work to maintain racialised hierarchies. While students often laugh off colourist jokes, we argue that they can harm those with dark skin. Furthermore, the fact that students with dark skin themselves, and particularly Black boys, also perpetuate colourist jokes may suggest that the prejudice is being internalised in concerning ways.
About the speaker
Dr Aisha Phoenix is a Lecturer in Social Justice in the School of Education, Communication and Society. Aisha’s primary research area is colourism, skin shade prejudice in which people of colour with light skin are privileged over those with darker skin shades. She was the principal investigator on a qualitative skin shade study that explored colourism among people of colour in the UK and she is a co-investigator on related quantitative projects.
She has also conducted research on: Muslim young people in schools and higher education institutions; perceptions of Islam; anti-Muslim racism and racism generally. Her PhD research focused on how Palestinian university students living in the West Bank narrated their lives under occupation to a foreign audience. In her work, she critically engages with issues of belonging and marginalisation and social justice. She is particularly interested in narrative approaches to understanding social issues.
Aisha has been named a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in June 2022. In her project she will conduct a large-scale study of young people's perceptions and experiences of colourism in the UK.
Previously, Aisha was the Post-Doctoral Researcher on the AHRC-funded ‘Re/presenting Islam on Campus Project’ at SOAS, University of London. The research, which was conducted at six UK higher education institutions, was published by Oxford University Press as the co-authored Islam on Campus: Contested Identities and the Cultures of Higher Education monograph.
Aisha has an ESRC-funded PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London, Masters in Social Research (Goldsmiths) and Social Anthropology of Development (SOAS), a Postgraduate Diploma in Newspaper Journalism (City University) and a BA in Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford). Before returning to academia, Aisha worked as a media and advertising reporter at Bloomberg News in London.
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