I learned the gradations in Kingston before anyone named them. Browning. Red. Clear-skin. Every yard had its taxonomy, every schoolroom its unspoken ranking, and no colonial officer needed to enforce what we enforced on ourselves. The British had gone home. Their measuring system stayed behind, alive in our mouths, alive in the way aunties appraised babies and decided which ones would go far.
Garvey warned us about this. “Never divide or create confusion between the different colors in the Negro race.” You no longer need an overseer when the yard polices itself, when the compliment lands like a qualifier: pretty for her light complexion. “Smart for a dark boy.” The exception filed into the rule. Every ranking by shade does the work of the colonizers for free. You do not need to conquer a people busy conquering themselves.
Slave codes formalized these distinctions. Field and house. African-born and Creole. Dark and light. Planters understood what Haile Selassie would later understand in reverse: unity threatens power. The counter-strategy was division. Let the captives manage each other.
We inherited that division, and it grows still in family photographs sorted by complexion, in casting calls, in the dating preferences we pretend are personal taste. The inheritance feels natural because we received it young, before language, before we had any frame for knowing what we were learning.
Selassie faced the same divide-and-rule tactic at the national scale. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia while the League of Nations watched. Selassie stood in Geneva and told them the truth: it is us today, it will be you tomorrow. They did not listen. He learned in exile what isolation costs a people, and he spent two decades building the Organization of African Unity so no African nation would stand alone again. He asked Nkrumah and the monarchists to subordinate their argument to the goal. Sovereignty first. The pace of integration could wait.
The colorism question demands something similar, because the same tactics remain in play. The diaspora wars that fracture Black Americans from Caribbean people from continental Africans follow the old script. Who is more authentically Black. Who suffered the right way. Who belongs, and who arrived too late to claim the name. The argument generates heat and no light, and while we debate something that Peter Tosh answered long ago, “No matter way yu come from, as long as you’re a Black man, you’re an African.”
The video ends with a challenge: build one bridge. For some, the bridge runs across ideology or generation. For others, the bridge runs across shade, across the old taxonomy we carry without knowing we carry it.
The colonizer left. The ranking stayed. What we do with the inheritance remains our choice.
