The White Privilege of Getting Darker for Fun
Because a permanent tan can get you killed.
My husband gave me the idea for this article one afternoon when his skin was on fire.
Earlier that morning, he’d spent five minutes in a solarium at the gym, hoping to tan his body to a slightly darker shade than its natural creamy hue. As he later explained, he was prepping his skin for our upcoming belated honeymoon cruise to Mexico. If he arrived on the ship looking as pale as Casper the Friendly Ghost, he’d probably burn so quickly he’d spend the first half of the cruise in excruciating pain and the second shedding peeling skin everywhere.
I was rubbing cooling lotion onto his back when he said something that got me thinking: “The things White people do to be black.” Although he doesn’t even remember saying it now, his comment resonated with me in ways I wasn’t able to explain while I was preoccupied with soothing him. Oh, the irony! I jotted it down to ponder later in a less, um, heated moment.
My husband and I log many hours talking about racism — how it affects me and how it affects us as a couple. We’ve touched on cultural appropriation and all the ways in which White Americans plunder Black culture for things that magically become acceptable and trendy when they wear them, on their skin and on their heads. Dreads, cornrows, and afros can get Black kids kicked out of school and cost Black adults jobs while gaining White influencers “likes” on Instagram.
During all our conversations about race, one thing I never thought to bring up was my complicated relationship with tanning. For me, it encapsulates one of the grandest ironies of Black and White in America. Considering all the negative connotations that are assigned to darkness and the high premium society places on whiteness, I’ve never understood why White people deliberately make their skin darker.
Tanning, nonetheless, was the bane of my existence while I was growing up in Florida. My White classmates were constantly going to the beach to cook themselves to a hue just a few shades lighter than the one that once got me disinvited from a friend’s birthday party. “The darker the better,” they’d say, but apparently, that only applied if “darker” wasn’t permanent.
I can’t count how many times my White classmates said things to me like “You’re so lucky you have a permanent tan” or “I wish I had a permanent tan like you.” They probably wouldn’t have understood the dark irony of their comments if I had explained it to them. I know grown White people who still don’t.
Getting darker for fun is the height of White privilege. The threat of sunburn notwithstanding, it’s another way White people reap benefits of Blackness without experiencing — and therefore, appreciating — any of the pain.
The same spoils apply to music. Singers of blue-eyed soul create facsimiles of Black soulnessness and earn big hits without having to endure the life hardships from which it springs. I’m not saying White people don’t have their crosses to bear, but from Negro spirituals on, it’s been the Black tradition to pour pain into art in a very specific way. Every form of Black music, from gospel to blues to jazz to rap to even country (which is rooted in the banjo, an African instrument), was borne from the Black experience, which is drenched in pain.
Rock & roll is a direct descendent of the blues, so it wouldn’t exist without Black pain. Anyone not fluent in its history, probably still would give credit to Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That’s the whitewashed version of rock & roll peddled by people like Gene Simmons of Kiss, who once had the nerve to disparage the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for inducting rap acts like N.W.A. Hey, Gene, Kiss never would have rock and rolled all nite if they hadn’t copied a blueprint created by pioneers the same color as the ones you’re so quick to “other” and dismiss.
The true architects of rock & roll were Black bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley, early R&B leading ladies like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Mama Thornton (who recorded the original version of “Hound Dog,” which would later become Elvis’s biggest hit), and Black piano men like Little Richard and Fats Domino. Black talent spent decades writing, performing, and recording what were then known as “race records,” often watching them be relegated to second-tier commercial status.
Meanwhile, White artists like Elvis and Pat Boone made them palatable to the White masses, selling millions and making millions that many of rock & roll’s Black pioneers never received. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the woman who influenced the White likes of Elvis, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, didn’t get a gravestone until 35 years after her death.
The whitewashing of music continues to this day. Artists like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber sing “Black” and score bigger hits and bigger careers than most Black artists who sing using the voice God gave them. John Mayer owes his weight in gold and platinum hits to Black blues, yet he once called his penis a “white supremacist.”
The sound of Blackness isn’t just in how the Ariana Grandes, the Justin Biebers, and the John Mayers of pop music sing. Many White stars and White kids who grew up listening to hip hop adopt Black cadences when they speak, presumably because it makes then sound cooler. Meanwhile, when Black people talk, to White people like Sharon Osbourne, they sound “ghetto.”
It’s the same White supremacy with its fingerprints all over blackface and the N word some Whites think it’s OK to use because Black people say it too. Never mind its loaded history as a weapon used by Whites to keep Blacks in a position of subjugation. For many of the former, the ramifications of the N word don’t matter until they get cancelled for using it.
If you weren’t paying attention to the news or suffering the consequences of being of African descent, you might mistakenly assume that in America, it’s good to be Black. But as anyone who doesn’t have a choice knows, that only applies when Black can be worn as a costume — on today, off tomorrow.
For the rest of us, Black may be beautiful, but Blackness can be the source of pain more excruciating than any sunburn a White person has ever had to peel off. It doesn’t go away. We wear it like a tattoo, maybe proudly, possibly defiantly, but always knowing it won’t get us as far in life as when it’s worn by some of the White people who despise it in us most.
