Tyrese recently posted to his Instagram his experience with ‘colorism.’ In an interview with Leah A. Henry of The Jasmine Brand, he explained his experience and how it affected his upbringing.
“Yeah, it wasn’t easy to be dark skinned in the hood,” Tyrese said. “But yeah, throughout my whole childhood, it was not cool to have dark skin in the hood. It was always the light skinned Black people that seemed to have gotten all the attention and all the love, and considered pretty, attractive, or handsome. And since I’ve been in Hollywood, we dealt with the same thing.”
He talked about his new movie with Terrence Howard and elaborated on how he was selected.
“I just did a film with Terrence Howard and we’re able to joke about it now but I was the star of the film and they had an idea to go with someone else, who I won’t mention, and then I suggested Terrence Howard. And he thanked me for like a week straight,” he said.
Tyrese further clarified that he thought about how Howard doesn’t know how many roles he was about to book, since he was a lighter complected Black man with green eyes.
He continued, “So it’s crazy to me. I’m number one, I’m the star, I’m this blue-Black, you know all the things I was laughed about in the hood.” Then you look at Lupita, you know kind of the Viola Davises of the world and there is kind of this shift that has happened.”
Sources: www.shadowandact.com, www.thejasminebrand.com , www.bossip.com , www.bbc.com , www.yahoo.com , www.revolt.tv , www.pagesix.com , www.people.com