This paper examines the stratification among African American women by skin
color on indices such as education, income, and spousal status. How racial
and colonial ideologies situate whiteness and blackness as symbolic repres
entations in relation to one another and the subsequent systems of discrimi
nation that develop from those ideologies is the crux of the theoretical ar
gument in this paper. Infusing the concept of constructed notions of beauty
into this racial paradigm further elaborates this process for African Amer
ican women. I hypothesized that light-skinned women would have higher educa
tional attainment, higher personal incomes, and would be more likely to man
y high-status husbands than would darker-skinned women. Even when controlli
ng for background variables, all three of the hypotheses are confirmed and
the significance of skin color, particularly the privileging of lightness,
is demonstrated.