Singer Ari Lennox received backlash this summer for tweeting about the clearly colorist tropes on the classic show Martin.
In true delusional fashion, the Black community is appalled over what they perceive as a slight of one of the great male comedians of our community, rather than how his show and antics may have been damaging to Black women.
Indeed, instead of taking the time to understand why Lennox called the jokes about our beautiful brown sister, Pam, triggering, most simply dismissed her and accused her of playing the victim and having fake outrage for attention.
Martin couldn’t be colorist because he never explicitly insulted Pam’s skin tone, right? Well, that’s the prevailing narrative. But that argument falls apart when you zoom out:
- He constantly belittled her features, her hair, and her desirability.
- He called her “nappy-headed” even though her hair wasn’t nappy. That’s featurism: a branch of colorism that targets texture, lips, noses, and other Black features society deems “too ethnic.”
- Meanwhile, Gina, his light-skinned love interest, was upheld as the romantic ideal. Even her skin tone was uplifted at all times. He often complimented her on her “soft yellow bone complexion,” as though it was something to aspire to attain or align with.
Misogynoir Gaslighting
Nevertheless, rather than listening to the brown woman telling us how she feels in real time, Black women are being gaslit by false equivalencies. For instance, people are comparing his colorist jokes to her short jokes.
Cool.
But you guys sound like the racist folks who scream “reverse racism” any time a Black person dares critique them in any fashion. The reason Martin’s jokes were always offensive to darker-skinned Black women is that he helped promote the European standards of beauty.
I mean, say what you want, but the whole “nappy headed” joke movement is the reason so many Black women literally went bald and developed issues such as uterine and ovarian cancer, which have been linked to the use of hair relaxers over prolonged periods of time.
Indeed, although more women are natural today than ever, there has been a blatant culture of shaming Black women for wearing their kinky hair in its natural state. So much so, that in 2025, we are still working to pass laws preventing companies from discriminating against Black women for wearing our hair in the same state as it grows out of our heads.
And although some Black men may have faced similar discrimination, on the whole, this featurism is reserved almost exclusively for Black women. This is the part that people ignore most of all. Generally speaking, colorism is not just the demonization of darker skin tones; it’s also the masculinization of it. Thus, when it comes to hair politics, Black women have always been at a much greater disadvantage, on a societal level, than Black men.
So, if you’re wondering why this issue continues to be ignored, I’d like to remind you that Black women have no allies and since these issues don’t also affect Black men, nobody cares.
However, when you apply colorism to matters such as police brutality, which does adversely affect the Black community as a whole, suddenly it starts to make sense, and even then, Black women are often ignored and gaslit when in pursuit of justice.
Separating the Art from the Artist
Look, even though Gina looks a lot like Martin’s real-life love interests and he was rumored to be secretly pursuing her in real life, the fact that his show is colorist isn’t necessarily an indictment of him as a person.
And no, it’s not lost on me that Tichina Arnold, AKA Pam, addressed and dismissed these claims on her own. Per Arnold, she didn’t see the show as colorist because she essentially saw it as part of the comedy. She also asserts that Martin even refused to deliver certain lines because he thought they were too disrespectful.
However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that she has been accused of being a Pickmeisha several times in the past because of her comments about the so-called “emasculation of Black men,” during a time in which many celebrity men’s misdeeds were being exposed. Ironically, she came to the aid of a group of men who continue to celebrate the very public masculinization of her character based purely on her skin tone.
Moreover, as a working actress who most likely still earns a decent residual income from reruns, she has no reason to speak out against the show. And as far as that’s concerned, I get it. Get your coins, sis!
Either way, Pam is much bigger than Tichina and her views; it’s who and what she represents. Pam is a gorgeous, brown-skinned Black woman who is treated like a throwaway; perpetually a plus one. She is always at least one step behind Gina in everything, even her job roles.
Moreover, when she did get love interests, they were usually the dusties. For instance, someone brought up how the character of Jerome was obsessed with Pam. First of all, that’s no flex. Second, was he obsessed with her or her ass?! I mean, his nicknames for Gina were “Apple Head” and “Red Bone.” How offensive. But his affectionate name for Pam, his potential love interest, was “ Junk in the trunk?”
This is yet another feature of colorism: lighter women are the wives, and the darker-skinned women are for fun. So, although men are arguing that Pam was very desirable to the men of the show, this is false. She was sexualized. Men were always gawking at her ass and making sexual advances towards her. Nothing about that is flattering.
And let’s not forget that she was also unmarried and barely even had any serious relationships, but that’s another topic for another day.
Bottom Line
Admitting Martin was colorist doesn’t mean we’re canceling Martin Lawrence himself, or even the show. It simply means that, with fresh eyes, we’re starting to recognize the ways in which the media feeds us these harmful tropes, which ultimately bleed over into our real lives.
In other words, let’s give Martin Lawrence the benefit of the doubt and say maybe he delivered those lines kicking and screaming.
Cool.
Even so, Martin Payne was an unapologetic colorist who was relentless in his dehumanizing of his brown skinned nemesis, Pam.
Honestly, if we’re candid about the reason going mainstream was once considered “selling out,” it’s that you often lose agency over your own intellectual property, as the powers that be only allow Black people to be successful if they’re able to infuse elements of degeneracy throughout their bodies of work. So, when it comes to the colorism on Martin, it’s certainly not 100% Martin’s doing.
Gaslighting Ari Lennox, who is a Brown woman entitled to her own opinions, is a real-time demonstration of how far the Black community has not come. Ari Lennox, in particular, had a rude awakening recently, after being the number one champion of Black men, she still somehow ended up being subjected to an egregious colorist campaign, launched by none other than, you guessed it, the very same Black men she was uplifting.
As Black women, we cannot allow people to continue to silence us when expressing sentiments that can empower one another. So, yes, I’m standing on business behind Ari Lennox.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission.