Colorism – discrimination based on skin darkness within a racial group – has plagued black Americans since their first arrival in the United States. Although colorism has taken different forms over time, lighter-skinned black people have always received advantages at the expense of their darker-skinned counterparts, and colorism is a problem that fosters ongoing social inequality to this day.

The Shades of Black Folk traces the development and evolution of colorism in the United States from its origins in the late eighteenth century right up to the present. It chronicles the phenomenon's various manifestations, from nineteenth-century debates about the fate of children born to parents of different races, through the contentious arguments between famed black activists Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, to the modern legal battles in which judges struggle to adjudicate color discrimination cases. Recognizing that this issue is made more complicated by rarely being picked up in discussions about race and racial discrimination, Reece calls on readers to grapple with the complexities of color-based inequality and offers policy suggestions to tackle it.

The Shades of Black Folk sheds light on an underexamined but all-too-powerful axis of social inequality and will be necessary reading for students of race, racism, and stratification.