Are You Hiring Based on "Colour Fit"?

Hello {{ first name | friends}},

I've been thinking a lot about colourism lately, and the way it's embedded in workplaces in white majority spaces, even when people racialised as white are unaware of it.

When your organisation celebrates hiring more Black employees, but those employees are hired based on how close they look to European-American norms, you're not doing inclusion; you're updating the hierarchy. And if dark-skinned candidates and employees continue to get less grace and fewer promotions, that says it all.

Colourism exists because white supremacy needed a buffer class. During enslavement, giving lighter-skinned enslaved people marginally better treatment created division within Black communities. That was the point.

And your workplace is still running that playbook when you promote the Black employee with looser curls over the one with a tighter texture, and when you put the lighter-skinned team member in client-facing roles while keeping darker-skinned colleagues "behind the scenes."

Yes, this happens, more often than you'd think, and it goes all the way back to the days of enslavement. Those lighter-skinned enslaved people, often the result of sexual assault and rape, were often given preferential treatment, as long as they "knew their place", of course. Sometimes, it seems that little has changed.

Because every time someone says "professional appearance" or "polished presentation," they often mean "closer to white." Whether it's dress codes, grooming policies, unwritten rules about what looks "leadership-ready": these are colonial standards. Many workplaces are enforcing the same hierarchies that enslavers used, just with different language. Think about it!

And just as in the period of enslavement, some Black employees are complicit because of internalised racism. They feel they must sacrifice authenticity to be safe and to get ahead (and they're not totally wrong.) And they police others' hair, skin, appearance and behaviour because that's how they survived. This is what generational trauma looks like in corporate form.