It's hard out here for a dark skinned sista to get some work! Just ask singer/actress Angie Stone. Well not actually hard to get work, but hard to get recognized if you don't have the old "paper sack" brown shade of skin. Angie gave an interview to Bill Vaughn over at Tastyclips.com, and she laid it out for us in black and not-so black terms. "Well, you know it goes back to the very beginning. If you were light skinned you were in, if you were dark skinned you were out. It very well works that way in the industry. You see very [few] dark skinned people on top of the game. Most of the superstars are very fair or mullatto people. You can check your stats. It works that way in the film world too. I have lost almost every single opportunity to star in a film to Macy Gray or Jill Scott because they're light and I'm dark. I've been told so many times that it's a certain look that they're looking for. So you can't even use weight anymore. You can't use age because everybody's over 35 that's running around doing it. It comes down to what is more appealing. I'm only good for the pro political stuff that will afford all of my people from the hood to vote for the right president - or to support whatever because I'm more on their level, so to speak. So to me it hasn't changed much. Slavery has just taken on a whole new different direction but it's the same process."
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