Critical Reflection The Color Complex
             The politics of skin color among African-Americans is complex subject with a long and tumultuous history. Three difference intellectual minds Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall examine the history and complexity of the issue of skin color among the African-American community. This issue is an extremely sensitive one that is rarely examined by the African-American community. As Russell describes it, African-Americans prefer not to "air there dirty laundry" in front of whites while pretending that skin color is not an issue among African-Americans. However, as Russell notes "beneath a surface appearance of Black solidarity lies a matrix of attitudes about skin color and features in which color, not expertise, influences hiring; and complexion, not talent, dictates casting for television and film" (Russell 1). The goal of this book is to reveal the nature of the color complex among African-Americans and to reveal the ramifications that the color complex has today in the African-American community.
             Russell does not attempt to answer any specific research question, as she and her colleagues simply examine the state of the color complex among African-Americans. People are interested in knowing more about the color complex simply because it an issue that is not discussed among the African-American community and simply unknown in society at large. The methodology used by Russell and her colleagues used to examine the color complex in the African-American community, were preexisting data and surveys. In her analysis of her findings Russell concludes that the color complex has its roots in the history of the African-American experience, more specifically the period of African-American enslavement and has been reinforced in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries by various media images.
             The beginnings of the color complex find their origins in the period of African-A...