Color
Light, Dark, and the Weight We Carried in Pittsburg
I grew up in the 80s in Pittsburg, California, learning early that Blackness wasn’t one thing. Not to us. Not to them.
Insecure Black women treated lighter-skinned Black women differently. I saw it. I lived it. I guess it goes all the way back — to when the white man put lighter-skinned folks in the big house and darker-skinned folks on the plantation. Divide and conquer didn’t die with slavery. It just moved into the schools, the beauty shops, the playgrounds. Jealous minds kept the old war going. Light against dark. Dark against light. And we were all losing.
In Pittsburg, it got ugly. Groups of girls tried to burn my sister’s hair. My brother’s too. “You think you cute” turned into matches and malice. Because being light-skinned meant you were a target. It meant you had to prove you were Black enough, tough enough, real enough. It meant you couldn’t win. If you were quiet, you were stuck up. If you spoke up, you were fast. Your skin was a conversation you never started but could never end.
So I learned to find friendship somewhere else. With Hispanics. Their culture was different. The way families showed up for each other. The way color didn’t cut the same way, not in my experience. I could breathe there. I could be Cathryn, not “that light-skinned girl.” I ate at their tables. I learned their slang. I saw loyalty that didn’t need me to pass a paper bag test first.
But no place was safe. Not really. I witnessed a white man beat my sister. In Pittsburg. In the 80s. I saw his fist. I heard her cry. And then I saw the system do what it always does when the victim is a Black girl — not much. A report taken. A shrug given. No justice, just paperwork. That’s when I learned another division: who gets protected and who gets processed.
The colorism inside our own community and the racism outside it — they were two sides of the same coin. Both said your worth was on the surface. Both said someone else got to decide if you mattered. The white man divided us on the plantation. Then we kept doing it to each other on the block. Meanwhile, he could still put his hands on my sister and walk away.
I don’t hate those girls who came for my sister’s hair. I understand them now. Insecurity is a poison the world feeds you, and then watches you feed it to each other. They were hurting too. But understanding it doesn’t take away the burn scars. Doesn’t take away the memory of having to watch your back in your own community.
Pittsburg in the 80s taught me that survival meant code-switching even among your own. Light around dark. English around Spanish. Quiet around cops. It taught me that friendship is where you find it, and sometimes that’s across a cultural line because the line inside your own house is too sharp.
I’m grown now. I know I’m not in the big house or the field. I’m in my own house, built by my own hands. But I still carry 1980s Pittsburg in my bones. I still remember the girls with the matches. I still remember my sister’s face. I still remember the officer who took the report and did nothing.
Colorism is a ghost we made real. Racism is a system we never stopped feeding. And I was just a little light-skinned Black girl in Pittsburg, trying to figure out why my skin was a problem for everybody but me.
