Light Skin Gone to Waste is a coming-of-age short story collection that brings a middle-class black family that moves into a predominantly white neighborhood to life. Toni Ann Johnson, the author and a light-skinned black woman, gives critical feedback on the systems of white supremacy. A key element of the story is the remnants of the structures of slavery and how they continue to plague the lives of black people. In the black community and the dominant white culture, there is the assumption that having white or lighter skin is a privileged experience. This is a tool of division within these marginalized spaces, as lighter and darker-skinned black people find themselves disagreeing over the kinds of experiences they have and the wider impacts …show more content…
The result of this is that light skin is a cog in the white supremacist system. Black women are both subliminally and overtly told that the only way they will be successful or find happiness is if they can somehow assimilate and conform to the white beauty standard. Failure to comply is met with great pushback. The treatment of black women by their friends, family, the world, and more is often saturated by anti-black rhetoric. While women are told to live up to the white criteria of perfection, they are simultaneously ridiculed for the times they make attempts to assimilate. In the chapter Time Travel, Maddie recounts an experience in which a man condemned her for her appearance and body. “That day, twenty-one years after I lost you, I’ll be wearing a tomato-red kufi atop unapologetically kinky hair—wild kinks I tamed the soul out of when I lived across the street from you, hoping straight hair would make me pretty and more like everyone else. But you called me an ugly, bubble-butted nigger at the bus stop. Elementary school became junior high, which turned into high school, and I barely