Serena Williams is yet again having to defend herself against trolls online. This time, she’s being accused of bleaching her skin after a recent video of her in stage makeup went viral. In the video, she appears beside her husband, Alexis, who is visibly dressed up in what appears to be some sort of stage or theatre costume, while she appears with blonde hair, a red lip and face makeup that people believe is a few shades lighter than her natural skin tone. Despite Alexis having recently undergone surgery to have half his thyroid removed amid a cancer scare, Serena is having to address…well, this.
She addressed the allegations during a livestream as she did a makeup routine and chatted with fans. She called the allegations ‘ridiculous’, explaining that sunlight can impact the tone of your skin. Then, she professed her love for her natural skin tone.
“I’m a dark Black woman, and I love who I am, and I love how I look, and that’s just not my thing,” she said, saying that while it may not be for her, it might be other people’s thing.
Serena is right about two things here. The first is the impact of sunlight on your skin. Plus, since retiring, she’s just not spending her days in the sun like she used to. There’s also an explanation that’s a bit more scientific – and it’s that as women age, pigmentation can decrease, particularly for Black women. So while many of us may recall Serena as appearing more melanated in her heyday, it’s also completely natural for her skin tone to change over the years.
But the second thing she’s right about is that skin bleaching is definitely some other people’s thing. It’s a popular practice in several Asian, African and Caribbean countries. So none of this is to deny that there are people out there who do bleach their skin. In fact, it’s so popular that according to the National Institutes of Health, skin lightening, also known as skin whitening, was nearly a $9 billion dollar industry in 2022, and it continues to grow in popularity, so much so that it’s expected to balloon to a $15.7 billion industry by 2030.
While the statistics are alarming, in looking at them, it’s important to ask the real questions. Why is it such a massive market? Why are people willing to spend billions of consumer dollars annually on the pursuit of lighter skin? And why would people assume that Serena is bleaching her skin to look more white?
Studies say part of the reason people partake in the practice has to do with what lighter skin tones represent in our society. According to the British Association of Dermatologists, people lighten their skin for a myriad of reasons, but mainly due to the “belief that lighter skin denotes an individual of higher status, socioeconomic background or physical beauty, than their darker‐skinned counterpart”.
When you pick that apart, it essentially highlights a two-tiered system in which darker-skinned people, like Serena, are perceived as less than. And the treatment she received throughout her tennis career, is an example of that. But while I would love to believe that people were simply expressing concern or asking a genuine question about Serena possibly engaging in skin lightening, with her history of being the target of unjust and racist treatment in the world of sport, I truly believe that the allegations stem from a place that’s a bit more sinister.
The odd thing, though, is that a lot of the allegations of bleaching came from fellow Black people, people who know all too well the experience of navigating the world with dark skin. In fact, she’s been facing these claims from Black people even before the recent video of her and Alexis went viral – and long before she responded to it.
A few days ago, this account, belonging to a user with a Ghanian flag in their handle, a country where bleaching is prevalent, vehemently accused Serena of bleaching, blaming the ‘colorism, misogynoir and masculinization’ she and her sister have faced.
Though that last user may be wrong in their accusation of bleaching, they are correct about Serena and her sister Venus facing colorism and misogynoir. I don’t think anyone, white or Black, can fully comprehend Serena’s resilience and ability to not only continuously bounce back after horrible treatment throughout her career, but maintain the pride she has in the very thing that has led her to being the target of that treatment – her skin.
With someone like Serena, it’s very difficult to categorize her. And we love putting people in boxes. Some may point to her as the poster child for someone who, by society’s (bullsh-t) definition, is supposed to have low self-esteem. And the fact that she’s in an interracial relationship can signal to people (ignorant people, anyway) that she’s not fully content in her Blackness and therefore wanted to look elsewhere for love.
In a study entitled ‘Come Back Home, Sista: Reactions to Black Women in Interracial Relationships with White Men’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, author Vanessa Gonlin found that Black women dating white men often faced ‘social sanctions’ from members of their community, leading them to feel ‘shame and frustration’. But because Serena makes it very clear that she does not feel shame or frustration over who she has married or her Blackness, it appears to have made her an even bigger target.
To me, this is a clear case of internalizing, which is a devastating by-product of racism. Some of the messages Black people have been fed in society have crept their way not only into our perceived self-worth, but the self-worth we prescribe others. And not seeing the experience we may be having, the feelings we may be feeling, reflected in the experience of another person, makes us question their own self-perception, even in cases where that person has no issues with who they are. We don’t see that Serena feels, at least not outwardly, the same feelings that some of us have struggled with – and therefore, we project.
What we do see in Serena, though, is someone whose mere existence is an act of resistance – to western, Eurocentric beauty standards. Someone who, in their natural state, disrupts the world as we know it, or rather, the world as we’ve been taught to know it. And while its natural for that to cause some sort of internal disruption to our worldview, perhaps we should work harder on changing our worldview than feeding ourselves false truths to make such a flawed worldview fit.
