Malachi Umeh

For decades, colorism has dominated the hip-hop community. The neglect of dark-skinned women in hip-hop and the entertainment industry remains a problem. New rappers with significantly less rapping skills come into hip-hop based on looks alone. The hip-hop community needs to work on showing the same attention to dark-skinned women as well as promoting diversity and representation.

Colorism remains a global issue in the Black community, as well as in the entertainment industry. The presence of this ideology demonstrates itself in castings of TV shows, modeling, music careers and movies. Colorism stems all the way back to slavery when lighter-skinned Black people received different treatment from their darker-skinned brothers and sisters. This prejudice remains a noticeable issue addressed by celebrities such as Coco Jones, Zendaya and Keke Palmer as conversations about colorism seem to continuously come up when speaking on the careers of Beyonce, Coi Leray and most recently, 23-year-old rapper Ice Spice. Ice Spice’s quick rise to fame demonstrates colorism’s bias and control over the hip-hop community. In the hip-hop industry, this discrimination persists with the careers of new rappers and the way their skin colors relate to their successes. The idea that light-skinned privilege grips the entertainment and music industry in a chokehold brings an important question: Do they demonstrate talent or just light-skin?

 “I feel like that’s not something personal to me. I feel like it’s been the conversation for generations and forever, since the beginning of time… I try not to feed into negativity because I also see that when people are trying to make that point, it’s not out of a good place…They end up putting somebody else down. If I do read the comments and see something negative I’ll leave. I’m not torturing myself. A lot of the time I know what they’re going to say because it’s mad predictable,” Ice Spice said.

The media believes that even though Ice Spice holds a lighter complexion, she has worked for her success. Although Ice Spice came a long way from where she originally started, she mainly gained popularity from the way she looks and one bar in her song.  As this conversation sparked controversy, people started to look at the career of Ice Spice in comparison to other rappers around her age such as 23-year-old rapper Tamia Monique Carter, popularly known as Flo Milli, who released over 30 songs while also signing to popular record labels such as  94 Sounds and RAC Records. Flo Milli and Ice Spice share the same age and style with minimal differences and differing skin tones. Flo Milli and Ice Spice both remain popular hip-hop artists but critics treat them differently. 

“I think it’s completely bogus to even fix her lips to even say a statement like this when we live in a world where rappers like Flo Milli, Baby Tate, Tink, Amaretto, [they] have been in the game for so many years and literally takes then so much longer to reach half the success that Ice spice has reached so quick, There are seriously so many dark-skin rappers who are way more talented than Ice Spice and don’t nearly have the same success that she does so for her to sit in her…seat and say that she does not benefit from colorism I’m completely withdrawing my support.” Tiktoker Abarbieforlife2.0  said.

Flo Milli started her music career in 2015 with her first single “No Hook” and slowly climbed the chart for years. In comparison, Ice Spice came out with her freestyle “Bully Freestyle” in 2021 and immediately gained immense success. Since then, Ice Spice worked with beloved artists such as Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift, while also making music for the Barbie movie soundtrack—the second-highest-grossing movie in 2023. The worldwide issue of colorism presents itself in multiple different platforms, jobs and cultures.

“I think they [lighter-skinned artists] get higher [more popularity] than other artists just because of their skin color and I think that they get more opportunities just because of the fact that they’re light-skinned,” senior Eliza Keith said.

 If the hip-hop community would start shining the spotlight on darker-skinned women in the industry and provide them fair chances—not because of their skin tones but because of their talents—the community would promote diversity and receive representation.