Colonial deposits: A transnational dialogue exploring historic and contemporary embodiments of colorism

This article contributes to the decolonization efforts in psychological science by initiating a transnational dialogue among Black women scholars and decolonial psychologists to highlight and dissect the historical manifestations and impacts of colorism across the United States and South Africa. We define colorism as a skin tone stratification system favoring lighter skin-conceptualizing it as both a colonial tool and a psychological consequence of White supremacy. We discuss how colorism travels across borders as an undertheorized, underrecognized, and ignored colonial inheritance. To understand this complex, deeply gendered psychological dynamic, we blend empirical psychological literature with collective and personal narratives, cultural artifacts, and historical recollections. Through historical analyses of race and skin color, we present empirical evidence of how colorism moves through our bodies. We draw on research projects in South Africa and the United States to offer models for continued inquiry into the economic, social, and psychological impacts of this interpersonal, transnational, transgenerational, political, economic, and deeply internalized construct. In our analysis, we lean on the works, scholarships, and activism of Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, Jioni Lewis, and Sinethemba Bizela to investigate colorism in its subjective, political, and intersectional dimensions. Most importantly, through this article, we invite the American Psychologist readership to consider colorism in its underexplored dynamics: its gendered nature, economic exploitation, and colonial legacies-to address the embodied understandings of colonization and the decolonizing project. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).