The Shades of Black Folk
Colorism Past, Present, and Future

Robert L. Reece (Author)

9781509565825, Polity Press

Hardback, published 5 December 2025

168 pages
21.8 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.34 kg

"Beyond the utter heft of his monumental claims, Robert Reece offers the reader analytical patience, intellectual tenacity, and a beautifully textured writing. Brilliantly constructed provocation at its finest."
Kiese Laymon, 2022 MacArthur Fellow and author of Heavy: An American Memoir

"As Reece deftly illustrates, the wicked 'problem of the color line' is our enduring reluctance to recognize it as a gradient by which the privileges of access and opportunity are conferred."
Meredith D. Clark, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Colorism – discrimination based on skin darkness within a racial group – has plagued black Americans since their first arrival in the United States. Although colorism has taken different forms over time, lighter-skinned black people have always received advantages at the expense of their darker-skinned counterparts, and colorism is a problem that fosters ongoing social inequality to this day.

The Shades of Black Folk traces the development and evolution of colorism in the United States from its origins in the late eighteenth century right up to the present. It chronicles the phenomenon's various manifestations, from nineteenth-century debates about the fate of children born to parents of different races, through the contentious arguments between famed black activists Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, to the modern legal battles in which judges struggle to adjudicate color discrimination cases. Recognizing that this issue is made more complicated by rarely being picked up in discussions about race and racial discrimination, Reece calls on readers to grapple with the complexities of color-based inequality and offers policy suggestions to tackle it.

The Shades of Black Folk sheds light on an underexamined but all-too-powerful axis of social inequality and will be necessary reading for students of race, racism, and stratification.

PART 1
1. Introduction
2. Colorism in the US

PART 2
3. Genesis
4. Reconstruction
5. Plessy and the One-Drop Rule
6. Making Modern Colorism

PART 3
7. Modern Legal Challenges
8. Color, Race, and What’s Next

References

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]