Aurielle Marie on what she has learnt from Tinder as a darker-skinned, queer black woman dating women, and how she still faces discrimination

I have my Tinder filters set to include men and women between the ages of 24 and 50 (judge ya mama, not me) in a six-mile radius of my Oakland, California, apartment. In my hometown of Atlanta, similar settings have provided matches to a trove of black folk running the spectrum of color, size, gender, ability and sexuality – a playground of sorts, filled with the uncles of a few former classmates, a well-renowned porn star living in Buckhead and one time, unfortunately, my fourth-grade art teacher.

But in Oakland, the radical black paradise of my childhood imagination, I find myself wading through white couples looking for “exotic unicorns” and black queers conducting virtual paper bag tests.

I am reminded with every swipe that my body is an irregularity in the world. I have somehow managed to be not just black, but darker than most people here in the Bay Area. I have managed to ignore the trending master cleanses, the Atkins diets and all other manifestations of the thin-crazed California culture which paints my 300lb body into an oddity. My girlfriend and I talk about “pretty privilege” and the Californian obsession with racial ambiguity and the peculiar way light-skinned people are exoticized by white people.

I don’t get it, she says. Honestly, neither do I.

Our practice of a “queered monogamy” – my girlfriend and I welcome and encourage sexual and intimate exploration, both together and separately – allows me to witness all types of interactions between my body and the world.

On any ordinary day, a seemingly harmless match can lead to an Asian-diasporic dyke asking if she can lick the chocolate off of me. I tense with each right swipe, knowing there’s a chance someone may have no regard for my humanity. And suddenly, there it is: Raury J, 28 years old, has matched! I hate dark-skin females. yall usually look dirty bt U kinda cute tho. Shame. She was only three miles away.

I am not the darkest-skinned person I know; I teeter between brown and deep brown. In my opinion, I am not “tragically colored”, to cite the great journalist Zora Neale Hurston – I can say that, finally, with some decade’s worth of therapy behind me. But I frequently have moments of uncertainty.

I grew up in the south where, for the most part, all variations of skin tones were considered acceptable, beautiful. Cousins and friends ranged from my great-grandmother’s “high yella” to a deep blue ebony. Colorism was still there, faintly: I remember getting scolded for playing in the sun too long. And my first silly crush was a girl with green eyes and freckles named Brianna, whom I labeled “the perfect kinda black” in my diary. While I understood my skin was a deeper version of black, I was shielded from the idea that it was terrible to be “darker than”.

But as I got older it became exhausting to navigate relationships in my dark black body. It has become my job to remind the people in my life that the burden of their anti-black conditioning falls on me. If anti-blackness denies a black person their humanity, then the primary function of colorism is to normalize a world in which people are offered less dignity, empathy and, yes, desirability, the deeper their complexion is.

Black people have for decades self-corralled to follow the rules of colorism: thinner noses and lips, looser curls, lighter eyes, general proximity to whiteness is seen as more valuable and desirable. I have never understood the role colorism plays in the cheap politics of desirability more than here, on the west coast.

Play Video 5:55 'People don't even look at me': eight black women discuss politics of light and dark skin – video

The slights of my childhood are more vicious now coming out of the mouths of women on Tinder. You look angry in your profile picture! says a gorgeous woman from a few neighborhoods over. (In my old neighborhood, we’d call her redbone, with her dimpled cheeks and slick edges.) My Tinder profile picture is me smiling in a bikini in the Pacific Ocean. My belly is well moisturized, my crooked teeth backlit by the sun. I was a little afraid to meet you this late.

I met her in my favorite neighborhood bar that evening at 7pm. When I asked her what about me seemed so scary, she appeared baffled. I’m not afraid of you! I’m just wary. I asked her when’s the last time she had dated a black woman. Chile, I strictly date black women. I’m only interested in investing in black love. What about a darker-skinned, fat black girl? I don’t know that I have. It’s kinda not my fault, cause I grew up in LA. That isn’t our usual type.

My heart sinks as I listen to her otherize my body, my decidedly un-classic beauty. With a shrug of her shoulders, she threatens an entire lifetime of my work to affirm my own value. And worse, she doesn’t even know it. When I leaned in for a platonic peck on her cheek at the end of our brief date, she shrunk away and stuck her hand out.

While I understood my skin was a deeper version of black, I was shielded from the idea that it was terrible to be 'darker than'

The labor of love is so great that I have often wondered why it is that I continue to explore partners outside of my primary relationship. And then I realize how radical it is to assert my own right to pleasure in a world that wants nothing more than to steal it from me.

I marvel with my girlfriend about my interactions with a new partner, telling her that in the few years we’ve been together I have found it easier and easier to articulate what delights me about my body. I have more vocabulary to talk about the ways I experience desire and pleasure, I do not withdraw in shame when it is time to discuss how I like to be touched or spoken to or engaged. Previously, I had felt the need to explain my worth to partners, to entice them with my humor or intelligence, bartering these gifts for their attention despite the darkness and largeness of my body.

There are defeating moments where I am reminded how little love the world has for dark-skinned girls. But by some miracle, after all this time, “there is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes”, as Hurston said, as I appraise my body, its deeply hued edges.

At least that’s what I tell myself every morning in the mirror. I celebrate the soft dark parts of me, the places I hid from my early lovers, the pieces I try not to recoil from, myself. Most days, I do not mind at all.

Share your experience of colorism: use the hashtag #ShadesofBlack on social media

