Juliet Ibrahim, a screen goddess, and filmmaker, recently told Nigerian media personality Chude Jideonwo about how light-skinned actors like herself are stereotyped.
She maintains that, contrary to popular belief, actors with lighter skin tones are the most discriminated against. Juliet explained, saying
“Everyone thinks that people with light skin have it all, but the truth is that we’re just like everyone else.” We, like everyone else, are human beings. And as I grew older, I endured a great deal of adversity. My skin color was one of the reasons for my low self-esteem. Because everyone thought I was favored and that whatever I got when I got it was unfair.
But I was a class-A student. I’d be competing against the best in my class. I’ll be right there with them if they take an A today. I’m the next person up, the Valedictorian. But it’s because I knew I needed to learn in order to pass. I wanted to be a superstar when I grew up, but my parents told me I had to pass in order to be the superstar I desired to be.
So I needed to pass, so I would study and do everything. It wasn’t because of my looks that I was in drama class, or first in class, or even second in the entire school when I graduated high school.
So it’s not about that anymore, and it’s come a long way. It has taken its toll on me over the years, to the point where people believe I am where I am today because of my skin color or appearance. Another thing is that we go through a lot of pain. As an actress, I struggle to get movie roles because there aren’t always enough light-skinned actors to pair up as parents.
How many light-skinned older men are there to play the role of father? So I’ve sometimes been passed over for movie roles because they’ll say, “Ah, we have to use someone who is dark-skinned because we feel like the pairing up won’t work, the casting won’t make sense.” There are lighter-skinned older actresses in Nigeria, which has been extremely beneficial to me.
So they’ll sometimes just pair someone like Ngozi Ezeonu as my mother. But it’s a lot because even in movies, they want to cast you as the home-breaker, husband snatcher, so there’s this narrative they put in the minds of people who are watching films, and I feel like that’s why we get misjudged with that light skin thing in Africa.”
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