Historically, the negative connotation of dark skin rooted in racial capitalism has led to the perception of fear and contempt of Black women.

Through this comparison between Obama and Trump, we see the same naked racism as the attention to her arms because she is known only through a “second skin” which places her as (un)knowable threat to the white body politic socially, politically, culturally, aesthetically, and psychically. This “second skin” is always already known within the Global North and South West racial epidermal schema in which irrespective of gender, class, age, ability or sexuality, black bodies are “sprawled out, distorted, recoloured animalistic, bad, mean, ugly, cannibalistic, lascivious but, most importantly, feared” (Fanon 1986, 113). Overdetermined by “this second skin”, Obama had to performatively enact a “known” bodily hexis as FLOTUS through “civility” as in colonial times. This civility was measured through how her body spoke, looked, behaved, and was adorned. She had to use glamour and professionalism to undermine the threat posed by her dark skin to the body politic imagined as white and male. We can see this assumed threat in the focus on her arms, muscles covered by her dark skin themselves covered by the “second skin”, where we can perceive fear, contempt and white ontological insecurity even as “the force of the racist episteme is imprinted on the body” (Puwar 2004, 41). As Charles Mills (1997) argues, the white body continues to be the somatic norm even if it is no longer juridically or constitutionally supported because the racial contract demarcates and reserves space for its white first-class citizens. Thus, reactions to Obama show the connectedness between anti-dark skin aesthetics and negative affect within racial capitalism. Dark skin is also affective outside of the White House space as we see next in a Teen Vogue article on Nyakim Gatwech. South Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech, called ‘Queen of the Dark’, has taken the world by storm simply because she celebrates and loves her darker skin (Sahu 2017). Nyakim went viral after posting a story of her interaction with an Uber driver on Instagram. When the Uber driver asked if she would bleach her skin for $10,000, 181 https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/index.asp UWI IGDS CRGS Issue 13 ISSN 1995-1108 Nyakim laughed it off. ‘I would never do that. I consider my skin to be a blessing’”, she told him (Roberts 2017) To “take the world by storm” because you celebrate and love the dark skin you live in, means that dark skin continues to be seen as problematic by “the world” and dark skin on African-descent women’s bodies is something that still attracts negative affect. We see this in the article which makes us assume that she should hate rather than love her dark skin as well as not celebrate it. Thus, selfhate and its binary self-love need to be looked at briefly here. According to Peter Hadreas (2016), personal love is looking together in the same direction and personal love wears down inequalities. If we take the back of the cab as a microcosm of the world in which she lives, Gatwech cannot look in the same direction as the taxi driver because to do that would be to reproduce herself as unequal and as ugly. To do that would be to reiterate that very hatred of dark skin which generalizes and constructs her through “an exclusive or” (Hadreas 2106, 2). The generalization is the assumption that she must hate her skin enough to want to change it, and the exclusive or is that she is both a fare and contemptible. The world she inhabits in the back of the cab is one in which a “limiting case of hatred emerges when groups of people are believed to be monolithically necessarily worthy of harm and blame” (Hadreas 2016, 2). That is a world dominated by white supremacy and shadism which together produce the iconic norms of whiteness and lightness as skin ideals and reproduce dark skin as ugly. Gatwech turns away from this world towards love of dark skin, towards self-love without reliance on the other to come into being. In contradistinction to the world of darker skin hatred she sees her skin as a blessing and would not bleach it even if offered a considerable sum of money. She negates the ruling episteme within racial capitalism where whiteness/ lightness is prized and brownness is desired, even whilst she undertakes global aesthetic labour as a model within it. She has “caused a storm” because she transgresses a racial aesthetic contract in the Global North/South West which has been centuries in the making and which is so pervasive that it has almost 182 Shirley Anne Tate: The Dark Skin I Live In: Decolonizing Racial Capitalism’s Aesthetic Hierarchies in the Diaspora managed to disappear into thin air because its negativity is a taken-for-granted aspect of social life. It is something that we are all inculcated to expect within a Global North/South West aesthetic “libidinal economy” which, for Frank Wilderson, functions variously across scales and is as ‘objective’ as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction and the violence of lethal consumption… it is the whole structure of psychic and emotional life… something more than but inclusive of or traversed by … a ‘structure of feeling’; it is a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, phobias capable of great mobility and tenacious fixation (7).