Color Gradation?

Growing up, racial diversity didn't really exist. Because I lived in a small town my whole life, there were very few people who weren't white. So I never knew a sense of "color gradation" really existed. (In my graduating class there was one black person of the 304 people graduating"

I had no idea how to approach this sense of colorism since I had never seen it first hand. So naturally my first idea was to google it. When I search "color gradation" I came across an article from the 1960s titled "Color Gradation and Attitudes Among Middle-Class Negroes". It started with a saying that was common among color-sensitive African Americans "If you're white, you're right! If you're brown stick around! If you're black, step back!" The article continues to give some statistics such as: before slavery was ended, lighter skinned slaves had a much higher value in the slave market than darker slaves. Additionally, light skinned african americans were accepted in educational settings and as property owners than dark african americans.

Reading this, I couldn't help but to think, " but this study was done 40 years ago, how can this possibly still be true?" So again I called upon google for help and searched "famous African Americans" On the Black History Month website I found a list which included: Barack Obama, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Serena and Venus Williams and Queen Latifah. I quickly realized a majority of famous African-Americans today are fairly light on the color gradation scale. In a way, I'm shocked that I never noticed this before, but maybe because it's so culturally reinforced, it often goes unnoticed.

(The link for the article if anyone is interested is:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2090824?seq=3)