I live in the United States and I've never experienced this "colorism" as it has been presented on this thread. I have read accounts of Afrikan people in the US from the 1950's in which people with dark skin were mistreated by other Afrikans whose skin was lighter, but I have not experienced that at all.
My mother is extremely fair skinned, and my father is brown, like me. All the women in my family (and somehow I got it too) have very long, curly, silky hair. But you know, my mother never commented on different grades of hair and I always assumed I had "plain old Black people hair". And before anyone starts with that business about light skinned Afrikans being less Black than the rest-I had my mother's line tested through the Afrikan Ancestry program at Howard University. She is 72% Senegalese, a higher percentage of Afrikan blood than MOST Blacks in the diaspora have.
I think a lot of the reaction against fair skinned Afrikans are by dark skinned Afrikans with a complex about themselves.
A good book that deals with this subject is called "Passing" by Nella Larsen. It's a quick read and extremely well written.
If fair skinned Afrikans think they are somehow superior to dark people, why were they slaves just like the rest of us? Why then did the police sic dogs and turn fire hoses on light skinned Afrikans just like they did with the rest? This kind of thinking is a result of the Willie Lynch tactic. Slave owners treated the lighter skinned slaves better, which in turn led them to think they WERE better. Same thing happened in Rwanda with the Tutsis and Hutus. I don't care if an Afrikan is light or dark.