For a dark nigga...smh

So I was at the mall yesterday pricing shoes that I'm thinking about getting and out of a group of San Angelo chicks in the store, one rolled up on me
Local: "Oooo, what's yo name? I ain't neva seen you around Angelo before!"
Me: "Haha, nah my name is Zach and I been for like four years."
Local: "Oh ok, that's cool. Well I just wanted to let you know that me and my girls think that you fine for a dark nigga."
 
Now WTF kinda back-handed ass compliment is that?!? Shit like that irks me bro. Don't try to play like dark skinned people can't be attractive. When I was elementary school age I used to issues about my self-perception of being dark skinned because it always seemed like all the chicks like the yellow dudes with good hair. I finally got outta that when I came into my own physically and mentally but I have noticed that within the black community there is a preference for dating light skinned people over dark-skinned.

A quote caught my eye the personifies what some black people feel about dating dark skinned people. “I can remember with glowing clarity one of my brothers coming home from high school and noting how difficult it was to date dark-skinned girls. The guys at school joked about wanting only the light-bright-and-damn-near-white girls. If you're caught with somebody dark, he said, they'll trash you,” says Portia Williams in her Beyond the Pale; Why My 'Too-Black' Friends Want Light-Skinned Babies article posted in the Washington Post.

A study was published in 2006 in the Race, Gender and Class Journal, indicated that lighter complexions were considered more attractive among African-American communities. The results were taken from a sample of 100 students who indicated that 96 percent of men preferred a medium to light complexion in women, while 70 percent of women found light skin of value in men.



Not surprisingly, almost every person I spoke with told me of numerous painful experiences; in fact, many of them admitted their own desire to reproduce lighter children -- children who could easily assimilate in a white American society,” says journalist, Portia Boone.


Personally, I'm proud of being a dark-skinned black man and I have no preference in what shade my woman is. I've dated everything from super high yellow/creole to almost as dark as me. I know the chick didn't mean any harm by what she said but the ignorance of the statement just irked me. And that statement just proves that there still are perceptions of attractiveness based on color.