I love Twitter. It’s a place where people can both enjoy silly jokes and engage in serious discourse. A lot of the time, the jokes and the discourse come together and create conversations about real issues. It was on Twitter that an interaction between a student and a local celebrity sparked one such conversation about colorism in Philippine media. It was this conversation by Filipino netizens that dominated my Twitter feed for a few days and left me thinking about the issue of colorism for a few weeks. During this time, my class was given one of our major assignments for the term: an op-ed about a topic related to race, class, or gender. I knew then exactly what I wanted to write about. Colorism in the United States, a country with multiple ethnicities, usually lives in the shadow of the more immediately visible issue of racism, but it is still very present. By contextualizing colorism in a country where it is prevalent, I hope to make it more visible to an American audience.

MARIEL DE LOS SANTOS is a rising junior at Boston University who was born and raised in the Philippines. She is majoring in Biology, and no, she is not a pre-med student. Her studies focus on Ecology and Conservation and she has a keen interest in life under the sea. She hopes to pursue a career in science writing.