Skin-tone discrimination by Whites and Africans is associated with the acculturation of African immigrants in Norway

The paper, in plain language

The direction nobody measures

Discrimination from the majority is a staple of acculturation research; discrimination from one's own group is nearly invisible in it. With Elisabeth Phillibert, I surveyed 162 African immigrants in Norway — recruited on streets, at community centres and leisure activities — about skin-tone discrimination from White people and from other Africans, their cultural orientations, and their well-being.

Each source pushes people away from its own culture

Participants reported more discrimination from Whites than from Africans, but both mattered, and symmetrically: discrimination from Whites went with weaker Norwegian-culture orientation, discrimination from Africans with weaker heritage-culture orientation, and through those orientations each form was indirectly tied to lower life satisfaction. The null is as telling as the effects: participants' actual skin tone — self-reported and rated — was unrelated to the discrimination they reported, suggesting no pigmentocracy in Norway, a country without a colonial pigment hierarchy; the measure may capture racial discrimination more broadly.

Why it matters

Belonging can be revoked from two directions, and integration policy that only watches majority behaviour sees half the field. The study extends my work on how majorities police who counts as belonging — from phenotypic prototypicality to acculturation expectations — into the within-group dimension. Its limits are honest ones: cross-sectional data, single-item discrimination measures, and a sample too heterogeneous to test colorism within specific communities.