A friend of mine posted a humorous status on Facebook, satirizing the Bangladeshi people who were agreeing with the Black Lives Matter movement in America. His argument was that we prefer women with lighter skin tone to darker one, and so we have no right to judge Americans while being entrenched in racism ourselves.

Of course, he and I both knew that sexual attraction has little to do with racism, but I could not shake the feeling of a deep-rooted connection between the two. So I did a little digging, and found out that it is not an issue specific to our country only, but an universal one. All over the world, fair skin is synonymous with beauty and status while dark skin is with danger and mystery.

It is not hard to guess where this sense of symbolism comes from. There is, of course, not one but many factors at play here. The one that is relevant to beauty standards, though, is cultural perception.

Ours is a culture largely based on farming. We associate dark skin tone with hard labor in the sun and rural poverty, while fair skin tone is associated with a comfortable and cosmopolitan lifestyle out of the sun. Skin color, for us, is a sign of social class structure, however invisible. Add to that the beauty standards put to us by the magazines, televisions, and billboards, and you have got a pretty shitty system in place defining the taste of a whole nation where mothers admonish their children if they play too long in the sun, where women feel ugly if their skin is darker than their friends’, where men use ridiculous amount of skin-care products just to look fairer.

Let’s get back to the connection with racism now.

I told the friend of mine, who posted the aforementioned satirical status, that preferring pale-skinned women has nothing to do with racism. I said, “You prefer women to guys for sexual partner. Would you call that sexism?” He countered: “What if majority of us prefer white skin tone, would that be racism then?” I denied the argument, but without proper reasoning. What I said was that he was mixing up racism with body-image issues–which was true, he was mixing them up–but I did not have enough counter-arguments. Now I do.

Enter colorism: the prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

Now, compare the definition above with that of racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.

What my friend was talking about was colorism. Neither he nor I was familiar with the term–which might be an issue in itself worth a deeper look into–and so we did not know what we were mixing up racism with. There is a clear distinction between the two. Racism is prejudice against an individual because of the marginalized ethnic or racial group they belong to. Colorism is prejudice against individuals with dark skin, typically directed by the people of the same ethnic or racial group as the victim.

Although preferring light skin color over others is not the same as having prejudice against people with dark skin, there is obviously a connection here. What the exact nature of that connection is and how it relates to racism, I am afraid is a bigger issue than I have the knowledge or expertise to explore and explain. I will leave you here to do your own research.

But before you go, let me ask you something. What exactly do you mean when you praise a person saying their skin is glowing? How does someone’s skin glow? Or are you praising them because their skin tone has turned lighter than it was before?