Earlier this year , social media went wild when it was announced that Mecha, the robot rapper created by FN AI, had signed with Capitol Records Music Group. With incredible talent living and breathing in the US, it doesn't make sense to give characters like Sims to a major record label that human artists would be willing to die for. And one look at the character's content is enough to know that it's about the vitality of black culture because of harmful stereotypes about my society.
Days after the announcement - the FN Meka was canceled following controversy on social media - TK Sacoh, founder of The Darkest Hue, took to Instagram to use social media to build community and inspire the color. Important discussion. "Are Blacks Imaginary Creatures?" he asked his followers. Using the example of FN Mecha and other popular avatars like Shudu, Sakoh argues that the continued trend towards light skin is developing in dangerous ways.
The presence of FN Mecca immediately became an impulse for me. A therapist once asked me how I would feel if my skin color were the same. I'm still not sure if she's expressing her own biased beliefs or just pointing out how colorism works against people with darker skin than her.
In 2022, our society seems to have emerged from the nightmare of inequality. I feel like a punch to the pit of my stomach to feel the sense of color and anti-darkness from people inside and outside the community, and it makes me gasp. It's an experience that's hard to put into words, so often people choose not to.
“Color is very isolating. Lots of other people go through it, but there's a stigma attached to being vulnerable. You just suppress it and keep it to yourself,” Sakoh said when asked about his motivation for focusing his online presence on the struggling color.
Two years ago, Sacco launched the profile as a safe place for black and brown women to discuss their experiences; he found it was underrepresented on social media.
"I keep turning, turning, turning, and I see some black person or some racially ambiguous person," he said. "I started hosting meals with black girls and my food was quickly refined for me and my needs."
"Some black girl," Mallett said. And of course it is done on purpose.
Sacco, now 22, immigrated to the U.S. from Sierra Leone when she was 5, first to Washington state (she recalls experiencing noticeable racism at first), and then to Philadelphia when she was 8. She recalls that before moving home she hoped to be surrounded by people like herself, but quickly found herself surrounded by other black people, dark skin and hateful jokes.
"I received very clear comments from my classmates. "Oh, you're too dark, you're ugly, you shouldn't read between the lines," Sacco says. It was during this time that he became better informed. The widespread use of whitening creams in his native Sierra Leone. "I drew these things in without knowing the language of color."
As an adult, I still struggle to find words to describe the color and often wonder if I'm angry. A common misconception when discussing color is that it is based on "preferences," making it difficult to differentiate. But the preference for lighter skin is an indelible symbol of the colonial mind, where Eurocentric standards of beauty prevailed and dark skin was considered undesirable.
Sena Leith, assistant professor of psychology and brain sciences at Washington State University in St. Lewis emphasizes the roots of colorism in slavery as a tool used by white supremacy to sow discord among enslaved people.
"Practices like allowing light-skinned people to work at home or giving light-skinned people certain privileges created segregation among blacks," Leith said.
However, this white central system of smell teaches us how to shape our noses to look sharper in the content we consume today, from music to beauty tutorials .
"If you're asking how colorism is different from racism, I think you're trying to use the idea that colorism exists in the black community and in communities of color where other blacks can't be racist against other blacks... show blind faith or prejudice against others," Leith said.
This racial bias is one of the key issues Sakoh hopes to address with the platform.
" At first I was just talking about colorism, but I think colorism is a gateway to talking about other types of racial violence," Sacco said. This aggression includes sexism, sexism, fatphobia, queerphobia, ableism, and more. "It's exciting to have this digital space that's a little controversial, but there's a lot of responsibility, so I think that's why I'm special."
Promoting an open discussion about colorism is important because color affects people in real life. This bias is often evident not only in Grams and Tik Tok, but also in the lack of welfare, education and care for black women and poor, queer, obese and disabled people. The latest example of this trend is the case of Piper Lewis . An Iowa court ordered a 17-year-old girl to pay $150,000 in restitution for killing her bully.
The Sacoh platform shows the toxic micronutrients that lead to these negative effects. “I can highlight the conflict and structural consequences for women and girls of color,” she says.
It was a color I first understood growing up when I sat in a hair salon and talked to my grandmother, an Afro-Latina from Panama, about how I felt in the salon. I will tell you how the women at the salon treat their customers with deep skin tones and skin like a burden, women with fair skin and soft curves are prioritized over other customers.
My grandmother heard and shared similar stories, especially how she dealt with people who spoke badly of her or other black people in Spanish. "Sé leerlo, ecribirlo, y hablarlo" - "I can read, write and speak," he said when people were surprised that he understood.
There's a suffocating trauma that happens when something toxic like white supremacy and light skin becomes a part of your childhood. In the digital age, that feeling is compounded by the idea that algorithms rule everything. How will you fight the monsters hiding in plain sight? For Sacco, the birth of FN Mecha was a timely and important occasion to make a statement.
The rapper, who has amassed millions of followers and generated views on TikTok, is produced by Future Music Company, Factory New. When news of the deal was announced , Ryan Raden, Capitol Music Group's executive vice president of experiential marketing and business development, told Music Business World that FN Meka was "just a preview of what's to come."
"Think about the biggest stars in the world," says former Factory New co-founder Anthony Martini. How many cars are for commercial use only? These comments are particularly troubling given the content of FN Mecha; video game-like reenactments filled with violent stereotypes about black people, the N-word, and disturbing images like police brutality.
Sakoh described our experience in a post. It shows how technology reduces and sometimes erases the identities of people of color into empty containers designed to create useful products for non-black people. He also points out how the internet has brought greater exposure to the black community that stalks, stereotypes, and exploits black bodies.
And the FN Meka is just one example. "If you use TikTok, if you use Instagram, if you use anything else, black people are producing their own culture ," Sacco said. “They're mining the data, measuring what's known, what's happening. They are digitally controlling black people online and using it to their advantage.
Not only was the music leaked, but the rap's computer-generated voice was created by black Houston rapper Kyle Hooligan, who says he wasn't paid for his contributions. "They stripped it of all the value it thought it had and threw it away with kindness," Sacco said.
Whether the industry wants to admit it or not, technology can help preserve color in any number of ways. Context informs Sakoh's support as contemporary pale skin (and racism in general) begins to take new forms online.
For example, AI will make effortless decisions every day, from job application visibility to hiring managers to health technology opportunities . Researchers are now studying how and why our machines make priority decisions and studying the needs and values of white people.
There are many technology companies to solve this problem. In May, Google integrated the Monk Skin Tone Scale, developed by sociologist Howard Ellis Monk, to improve compatibility of its products with darker skin tones . For nearly a decade, sociologists studying how skin color affects black life experiences and outcomes have found stark differences comparing white and black African-Americans in everything from education to mental and physical health. Research has shown that technology mimics this bias.
"There are many examples where artificial intelligence combined with computer vision technology has not worked effectively with people of color," Monk said. "This includes things like the camera's automatic white balance not working well on dark skin, and self-driving cars having trouble recognizing dark-skinned people as humans, especially in low light."
The ultimate goal was to solve some of his and other researchers' biggest problems with the skin color scale to replace the current Fitzpatrick scale as the industry standard.
"I would add that the problem is beyond artificial intelligence. There are many tools, such as pulse oximeters, that use light and computer vision to assess poor health in blacks.” It is overrated due to incorrect equipment. These technological challenges exacerbate long-standing racial disparities in health care access, delivery, and quality.
While The Darkest Hue has gained popularity for its slideshows that show color trends in clean, easy-to-digest segments, Sacco's main goal remains simple. From giving visibility to ordinary black people to exposing learned biases, she created a space for young women to come and learn a language that heals their wounds.
"I want them to know the language so they can do the work now so it's less painful later." "So they don't have to wait until they realize they're not, and they don't blame themselves for how the world treats them."