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I had a conversation this week with Kimba White Dupree — educator, radio host at WBOK in New Orleans, womanist, mother, lifelong New Orleanian — and we sat with something most folks won’t sit with. We talked about colorism.
Not the TikTok version. Not the “light skin, dark skin” meme version. The actual structural, historical, Catholic-colonial, last-name-traceable, plantation-rooted, currency-bearing version. The version where lightness was literally legal tender.
And we used New Orleans as the case study. Because if you want to understand how colorism actually works in America — not the sanitized version, not the “we all Black at the end of the day” version — you need to understand New Orleans. That city is the receipt. Feel me?
Let me put you on.
Racial Literacy Means Reading and Writing the Situation
Before we even get to New Orleans, let’s level-set. Most of y’all lack racial literacy. I don’t say that to insult you. I say it because we are products of an education system that does not teach us how to read race as a structure. We get taught race as a personal feeling — am I racist, are you racist, did somebody hurt my feelings — instead of race as a hierarchy with property rights, legal designations, and inherited wealth attached to it.
When I asked Kimba what came to mind when I said “racial literacy,” her first words were: “white by law.”
Let that marinate.
She pointed out that until the 1940s, white people in this country didn’t all get to be “white.” Italians were Italians. Russians were Russians. Germans were Germans. Irish were Irish. Each group identified by country of origin. Then somewhere in the 1940s, the census, the Social Security infrastructure, and the broader project of racial consolidation pulled all those groups under one umbrella: Caucasian. White. One designation. One political coalition. One inheritance line.
That’s a constructed whiteness. It got built. On purpose. To consolidate power against everybody else, especially us.
Now hold that thought, because the same century where whiteness was being consolidated up north, New Orleans was running a completely different operation down in the Gulf. And that operation is where colorism in this country gets its sharpest, most documented, most legally codified form.
Why New Orleans Is Different — And Why Y’all Need to Stop Treating It Like a Costume
Most folks treat New Orleans like a vacation. A weekend. A daiquiri on Bourbon Street. Beads. Beignets. Maybe Essence Fest if you fancy.
But New Orleans is the uppermost part of the Caribbean.
Read that again.
Geographically, culturally, in terms of the Middle Passage — for most of the era of trans-Atlantic enslavement, New Orleans was the northernmost Caribbean port. We don’t think about it that way now, but we should. Because the cultural inheritance of the city — the food, the music, the language, the religion, the way race is structured — none of it makes sense if you keep trying to read New Orleans as just another American Southern city.
Louisiana is Indigenous. African. French. Spanish. Haitian. And Catholic — heavily, structurally Catholic, in a country where Catholicism is a minority faith. The state has one of the largest populations of Black Catholics in the United States. Xavier University, where Kimba was sitting when we talked, is the only Black Catholic HBCU in the country.
Now here is what most people don’t catch: Catholicism, in its colonial form, structures race differently than American Protestantism does. American Protestantism gave us the one-drop rule — binary, clean, brutal. Catholic colonialism gave us gradation. Quadroon. Octoroon. Mulatto. Passé blanc. A whole hierarchy of fractions. A measuring system for your distance from whiteness.
And in Louisiana, those weren’t just slurs. They were on birth certificates. They were on property deeds. They were tied to inheritance, marriage law, schooling, employment, and access to capital. Kimba told me she could pull her family records right now and the word “mulatto” lives there in the official paperwork. Not as an insult. As a legal classification.
That’s racial literacy. That’s understanding that the words we now treat as offensive were, in the not-too-distant past, the technical vocabulary of how the state organized human beings.
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Lightness as Currency: The Plantation Economics of Color
Here’s the part that should make you uncomfortable, because it should.
Kimba broke it down plain: in Louisiana, the lighter you were, the more likely you were the child of the master of the house. That wasn’t shameful gossip. That was the math. With French enslavers, Spanish enslavers, and yes, a small class of Black enslavers who bought their own family back, the gradation of skin became a record of who belonged to whom. Before genetics testing, color was the genetic test. The lighter your kin, the closer they were tied to the family that owned them.
And in some cases — this is the part nobody wants to deal with — French slave owners married the women they enslaved. Which meant property. Which meant a pass-along of land, of money, of social capital. So now you’ve got generations of light-skinned families in New Orleans whose fairness isn’t coincidence. It’s an inheritance line. It’s documented. It’s traceable through last names — Bourgeois, LeBlanc, Dupree, the whole French registry.
For a long time, being lighter didn’t just mean closer to white. It meant a special Black. A Black with a different relationship to property, to money, to access. The money eventually runs out across generations — but the color stays. And the color keeps spending. Because by white standards, the gradation determined who got considered “pretty.” Who got considered hireable. Who got considered marriageable. Who got considered safe.
This is why Kimba can tell you: New Orleans has never had a dark-skinned mayor. Not once. Look at the leadership of the city across decades — the political class, the business class, the social and pleasure clubs — and you will see fairness as a through-line. That’s not an accident. That’s the residue of an economy where lightness was currency.
The receipts are right there.
Mulatto, Creole, and the Trap of Misreading the Vocabulary
Now in the comments while we were live, somebody asked: why are you using “mulatto”? It’s a slur.
Fair question. And here’s where racial literacy matters, because the answer isn’t a clean yes or no.
Yes — in 2026, “mulatto” is broadly considered offensive, derived from a Spanish/Portuguese root tied to mules (which is exactly why people object to it; it implies hybridity, sterility, a categorical “in-between” that wasn’t fully human in the eyes of the state). I respect that critique completely.
And — for Black Louisianans of a certain generation, “mulatto” appears on their actual birth certificates. It is not a slur their family hurled at them. It is the word the state used to classify them. To erase the term entirely is to erase how the state did the classifying. Kimba’s position — and I think it’s the historically honest one — is: I understand why people would have a reaction to the term, but it lives in my ancestral records. You can’t just retroactively scrub it without erasing the violence that put it there.
Now — Creole. This one matters even more, because most of y’all are using it wrong.
Creole is not a color.
Creole is a culture.
Creole is how we cook, how we worship, how we bury our dead, how we speak. Creole is gumbo and red beans on Monday and fish on Friday and the sign of the cross when you pass a cemetery. Creole is the language — French peppered with African and Spanish — that your grandparents spoke. Creole is Catholicism layered over West African spiritual practice layered over Indigenous land knowledge layered over French colonial law. It’s the amalgamation. That’s what Creole means.
And here’s the part that breaks people’s brains: there are white Creoles. Yes. Real ones. Creole-by-culture white folks, mostly French-descended, who grew up in that same soup. The book Interview with the Vampire gets this right — the character Louis is a Creole, and in the novel he’s not racially unambiguous in the way the Brad Pitt casting suggested. Creole is cultural, not chromatic.
But because lightness in New Orleans was so heavily concentrated among Creole-identified families, and because lightness was currency, the word got flattened in the popular imagination into a synonym for “light-skinned Black person from Louisiana.” That flattening erases the actual culture and reduces a 300-year-old cultural inheritance to a complexion. Don’t do that. Read the situation.
The Hierarchy and the Hurt: Why I Won’t Let This Conversation Go Bi-Directional
Now here’s where the conversation gets sharp, and where I’ll be honest with y’all about where I land.
Me and my co-host Toya G have been going back and forth for a minute on this question: when we talk about colorism, do we talk about it as a hierarchy — light over dark, full stop — or do we talk about it as bi-directional, where everybody catches hurt?
Both things are true. But they are not equally weighted.
There is real hurt that light-skinned people carry. Kimba was clear about it, and I’m going to be clear about it too. Light-skinned folks get accused of acting white. Light-skinned folks get sexualized in ways that flatten them into a fetish. Light-skinned Black men in particular get their masculinity questioned — Michael Beasley just went on Shannon Sharpe’s show and broke down growing up with green eyes and long hair and having to fight constantly because brothers underestimated him. He told Shannon, “I always seen me as you. Y’all didn’t see me as you.” That’s real. That alienation is real. The hurt is real.
And.
Light-skinned people are still preferred within the hierarchy of race. Closer in proximity to power. Closer in proximity to privilege. Closer in proximity to the magazine covers, the leading roles, the corporate suites, the political offices. That doesn’t get erased because somebody on the lighter end of the spectrum experienced rejection or alienation. Both can be true at once.
The trap of bi-directional framing — and this is where I push back on the “we all hurt the same” version of the conversation — is that it mystifies the hierarchy that produced all the hurt in the first place. There’s an analogy I keep coming back to: there are white people who experience real resentment from being positioned inside white supremacy. That hurt doesn’t negate that they are still the primary beneficiaries of the system that’s hurting them. Same logic applies inside Blackness. Lighter-skinned Black folks can carry real wounds and still occupy a structurally preferred position.
The work is to hold both at the same time. Acknowledge the hurt without flattening the hierarchy. Acknowledge the hierarchy without dismissing the hurt. That’s emotional intelligence. That’s racial literacy. That’s the job.
Don’t make me pick. I won’t pick. But I won’t let you pretend they’re equal either.
Gender, Color, and the Megan Thee Stallion Problem
We can’t talk about colorism without talking about how it intersects with gender, because the two systems do not operate independently. They braid together, and the braid does specific kinds of violence to specific kinds of bodies.
Kimba and I got into the Klay Thompson and Megan Thee Stallion situation because it’s a perfect case study. (And before y’all come for me — yes, I know how to spell Klay Thompson now.) Megan is brown-skinned, statuesque, sexually free, financially independent, taller than most of the dudes who want to humble her, and unapologetic about all of it. She is a structural threat to a particular vision of Black femininity that demands docility, smallness, sexual restraint, and emotional service to men.
And what does the culture do? The culture spends years rationalizing Tory Lanez shooting her. The culture spends years asking what she did to deserve it. The culture watches Klay step out on her and treats it like a victory lap — for him.
Kimba’s read on this is sharp: a lot of dudes celebrating Klay are not celebrating Klay because they like Klay. They are celebrating because they want what Klay has. Megan being free is offensive to a lot of men because freedom in a Black woman who looks like Megan reads as insubordination. It’s not really about her morality. It’s about her autonomy. And the colorism layer underneath all of it is that a brown-skinned woman with that much autonomy doesn’t get the soft-launch protection that a fairer-skinned woman with the same autonomy might get. (Beyoncé, for all the parasocial scrutiny she gets, has been able to keep certain things private in ways Meg isn’t permitted to.)
Then there’s the homoerotic shadow Kimba and I started circling. The same dudes who are loudest about “no homo” are doing the most homoerotic stuff — dropping everything to run to a homeboy, performing intense emotional labor for other men, fantasizing in public about other men’s sexual conquests. Some of that “Klay deserved better” energy is, academically, dudes wanting to be in the room with Klay. Feel me? That’s not me being cute. That’s me reading the situation.
And the gender-color cocktail produces predictable patterns: dark-skinned women get desexualized or hyper-sexualized but rarely allowed to be soft. Light-skinned men get their masculinity contested. Dark-skinned men get their femininity weaponized against them in arguments — “you a b***h, you soft, you a hoe” — which reveals, by the way, that misogyny is the foundation under all of it. The first move when men want to harm another man is to feminize him. Because femininity is treated as the lower category. That’s not a colorism problem. That’s a misogyny problem. But the two systems compound.
Kimba’s line on this was perfect: a lot of men don’t actually like women. They like rubbing up against women. There’s a difference.
The Quadroon Ball, Plaçage, and Why Y’all Need to Read Outside the Curriculum
When I was getting ready for this conversation, I went down a rabbit hole on something called the Quadroon Ball — 19th-century New Orleans social events where free women of color (often classified as one-quarter African descent) met wealthy white men to arrange a system of concubinage called plaçage. The wiki entries hedge — “frequently romanticized,” “likely rare or mythologized” — but the receipts in New Orleans tell a different story. This was not a myth. This was a documented practice. Women were, in effect, contracted into long-term arrangements with white men who would house them, support their children, and sometimes pass property to them, in exchange for sexual and domestic exclusivity outside of marriage.
That is colorism, gender, and economics fused into a single institution. It’s a market. The currency is lightness. The product is access. The buyer is whiteness. The seller is — well, that depends on how you frame agency under coercion, which is its own conversation.
And this is the same city that produced Plessy v. Ferguson. Think about that for a second. The Plessy case — the case that legalized “separate but equal” for the next sixty years — came out of a deliberate civil rights challenge organized in New Orleans. Homer Plessy was selected because he was light enough to pass; the whole point of the test case was to expose the absurdity of racial classification by having a man who was visibly white be arrested for sitting in a white train car. The Creole community in New Orleans organized that challenge. They lost in 1896. The country lived under the consequences for decades.
Same city, same century, also produces the integration of McDonogh 15 — the Lower Ninth Ward elementary school where, in 1960, three Black girls (Dr. Gail Etienne, Dr. Leona Tate, and Dr. Tessie Prevost) integrated alongside Ruby Bridges’ integration of William Frantz Elementary across town. White parents at McDonogh 15 unenrolled their children en masse. Dr. Tate sat in a classroom with a teacher and no other students. White flight from the Ninth Ward to Slidell followed. The same city that mounted the most sophisticated legal challenge to segregation in 1896 was, sixty years later, the site of the most aggressive white refusal to integrate primary schools.
That contradiction — Plessy and Ruby Bridges, the legal challenge and the white flight, the Quadroon Ball and the Civil Rights movement — that’s New Orleans. That’s why I keep saying the city is the receipt. It contains every contradiction American race-making produces, and it doesn’t bother to hide them.
The Erasure of Southern Black Culture
I’ll close with the thing that’s been gnawing at me, because I’m a Southerner and I’m tired.
Right now, all over the internet, people are romanticizing the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration. The Cotton Club. Langston Hughes. Zora Neale Hurston. Jazz in Harlem. Black New York in the 1920s as the cultural high-water mark of the diaspora.
That’s beautiful. That’s real. I’m not knocking it.
But the birthplace of jazz is not Harlem. It’s New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton was from New Orleans. Louis Armstrong was from New Orleans. The Dew Drop Inn was in New Orleans. The artists who got celebrated in Harlem had to tour — they had to come down South and back, because Harlem alone couldn’t pay them. Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin both spent time in New Orleans; there’s a famous photo of them dancing at a New Orleans family home. The Dooky Chase restaurant had a backroom where Civil Rights organizers met because Black folks weren’t supposed to be assembling that way in public.
When y’all flatten Black 1920s culture into “the Harlem Renaissance,” you erase the South. You erase the people who didn’t migrate. You erase the artists who were touring back and forth and seeding culture in both directions. You erase the fact that while Harlem was renaissance-ing, my people in Texas were trying not to get lynched, and Kimba’s people in Louisiana were inventing the music Harlem was importing.
That erasure isn’t accidental either. It’s continuous with how American history erases Southern Blackness except as a setting for plantations or the Civil Rights Movement. We don’t get to be the producers of culture. We only get to be the suffering setting for culture, or the migrants who left to make culture somewhere else.
I’m calling that what it is. That’s Southern erasure. And it’s something I’m going to keep beating the drum about, because the receipts are too thick for us to keep getting written out of our own story.
Education Is Elevation
If you read this far, this is the part where I tell you what I always tell you. This work… this kind of writing, this kind of research, this kind of “Research over MeSearch,” does not exist without paid subscribers. I don’t take corporate money. I don’t run sponsorships that compromise the analysis. The reason I can sit with Kimba for an hour and a half on a Monday morning, run the receipts on Plessy, dig into the Quadroon Ball, push back against bi-directional framings of colorism without watering it down for an algorithm — that’s because some of y’all decided this work was worth paying for.
Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
5. FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS
* Whiteness is a coalition that got built, not a fact of nature. Italians, Russians, Germans, and Irish folks were classified by country of origin until the 1940s, when the U.S. consolidated them under “Caucasian.” Understanding whiteness as a constructed political coalition is the foundation of racial literacy.
* In Louisiana, lightness was literal currency. Tied to plantation inheritance, French and Spanish colonial law, Catholic marriage practices between enslavers and enslaved women, and property pass-through. The fact that New Orleans has never had a dark-skinned mayor is the residue of an economy that priced complexion.
* Creole is a culture, not a color. It refers to the cultural amalgamation of French, Spanish, African, Indigenous, and Catholic traditions in Louisiana. There are white Creoles. There are Black Creoles. Collapsing the term into a synonym for “light-skinned” erases 300 years of cultural inheritance.
* Colorism is a hierarchy, not a bi-directional grievance. Light-skinned folks carry real wounds — alienation, masculinity contestation, fetishization — and are still structurally preferred within the racial order. Both can be true. The “we all hurt the same” framing mystifies the hierarchy that produces all the hurt in the first place.
* Southern Black culture gets erased in romanticized accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz was born in New Orleans, not Harlem. Plessy v. Ferguson was organized in New Orleans. Civil Rights strategy was hashed out at Dooky Chase. The continuous erasure of the South from Black cultural and intellectual history is part of how American history flattens the diaspora.
Related Readings
* Brown, Brandi Amara. Read All Kind of People: A Field Guide to Reading Race in the Black South (referenced as foundational reading on Southern racial reading practices).
* Domínguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. Rutgers University Press, 1986.
* Gould, Virginia Meacham. Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South. University of Georgia Press, 1998.
* Haney López, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York University Press, 1996/2006.
* Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
* Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
* Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 1999.
* Medley, Keith Weldon. We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Pelican Publishing, 2003.
* Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
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