The dark skin I live in: Decolonizing racial capitalism’s aesthetic hierarchies in the diaspora

Dark skin on Black women’s bodies has become a Black Atlantic diasporic (post) colonial artefact circulating discursively within the skin value hierarchy of racial capitalism. This article uses a Black decolonial feminist approach to analyse racial capitalism’s “second skin” discourses of dark skin as contemptible object established prior to and during enslavement and colonialism. Drawing out its contemporary manifestations in the narratives of/ about Black women celebrities, the analysis shows that libidinal economies of dark skin continue to impact women’s lives. Indeed, the impact of “second skin” discourses can produce alienation from oneself if one begins from shadism and/ or whiteness. However, this article argues that women with dark skin dis-alienate from “second skin” (Cheng 2011) discourses to construct the skins they live in as objects of love through naming and critiquing diasporic discourses which reproduce their skins as valueless. Through the routes of social media, their critiques of “second skin” discourses produce and maintain alter/native constructions of dark skin value, a radical Black aesthetic consciousness, a new “livity” (Chevannes 1994) within diaspora which unsettles dark skin’s negation