Oh, no we're not the only ones dealing with this issue. It's one of the side effects it seems of colonization. You should have some conversations with Asian and Latino people because many of them will talk about how discrimination in India and Spanish speaking cultures, based entirely on different shades of color is absolutely a thing.

Desi girls often talk about how they're treated if their skin is very dark. You'll notice in Bollywood films ALL the women in the movies are light skinned and I know Indian women who are darker than me (it's also a culture in which skin color is closely related to class since it's something that existed before colonization by the British. Colonization simply exacerbated the issue.) Dark skinned Indian women don't even get a chance to be actresses in that industry, that's how pervasive colorism is.

In Latino cultures almost ALL of the media is light skinned as well, even though I know there are a lot of Afro-Latinos in the various cultures of South America, and Latinos often talk about how they are encouraged to marry light skinned people, so their children can be light skinned, or to stay out of the sun so they won't get darker. (This isn't everyhwere but it is common.)


In places like Korea and China, the whiter a woman's skin is, the more beautiful she is considered to be and no one makes any secret of that. Skin whiteners are a booming industry in Korea and China. (Also in India, and parts of Africa!)

It's not that these things don't happen in other cultures, it's just Black Americans will much more openly discuss it in public forums than Asian people, for example.