In 2026, Black women have gone out their way to proclaim their love for men like Aldis Hodge, Morris Chestnut, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Idris Elba. That is, they love them some men with chocolate skin. As a chocolate brother myself, I love to hear it. But let me tell you… it ain’t always been this way.
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Much of the discussion about colorism in our community has centered on the experience of dark-skinned Black women. But there is another conversation that is long overdue because wasn’t nobody checking for dark skinned Black men until the mid 1990s.
Look, the economic outcomes of Black men are not as impacted by their skin color as they are for Black women. The numbers prove that lighter skinned Black women often get better pay and more marriage prospects while darker-skinned Black women face more discrimination and higher economic instability. This is not as true for Black men.
But that doesn’t mean that men from our community were not impacted by how their skin color was perceived. While the impact was not financial, there is another way that colorism affected Black men: desirability. Or, to put it another way, not everyone found dark skinned Black men attractive.
Don’t believe me? Let me put you on game.
In the 80s, many Black women wanted a man who looked like El Debarge or Prince. This continued into the early 90s as men like Christopher Williams and ol unibrow having Al B. Sure! took center stage.
These preferences were fueled in part by messages Black folks were getting from the media. Phillip Michael Thomas, a light skinned green eyed Black man, was one of the leads on Miami Vice, one of the biggest TV shows of the 80s. The popularity of the weekly crime drama fed an ethos that placed a preference on men that looked like Ricardo Tubbs.
So back in the day, men like Michael Jackson, LL Cool J and even Lionel Ritchie were Black men viewed as sex symbols. Then something happened. We met a character named Nino Brown.
Wesley Snipes changed the game for Black men. Denzel Washington was beloved by both white and Black women, but he was not considered to be a dark skinned man. So his arrival on the scene wasn’t a game changer. Wesley’s arrival was.
He hit the scene, and you began to see a change in how women talked about Black men. In the span of four years in the 1990s, Snipes appeared in over 10 films. He was sexy in “Jungle Fever,” “Passenger 57” and “Sugar Hill.” He was compelling in “White Men Can’t Jump.” And he was menacing and funny in “Demolition Man.”
Snipe’s omnipresence in the early 90s paved the way for other dark-skinned men to break through. After he became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, you began to see other men whose skin looked like his start to be treated like men who were worthy of being desired.
Wesley Snipes is the reason dark skinned Black men get the love they do in 2026. If it were not for him, Black women would only want Shemar Moore and Aaron Pierre looking dudes. He walked so Chestnut and Damson Idris could run.
Straight From 
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