Entry · catalog no. 1301
colorstruck
/ /ˈkʌlɚˌstɹʌk/ /KUH-ler-struk
adjective · Black American, nationwide; documented in Southern Black speech and in Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville by the 1920s and 1930s · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
Vain about one's own light complexion; carrying fair skin as if it were rank.
“She got colorstruck the minute somebody told her she was too pretty to be that pretty.”
2.
Wanting only light-skinned people, and refusing darker ones, in dating, marriage, or admission to a circle.
“He is colorstruck and everybody knows it — he has never once brought a dark-skinned woman home.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, and Black-internal from the first record: the earliest sources are Black writers and Black community ethnography, not white observers. It surfaces in print in the 1920s and is documented in both Southern and Northern Black speech by the 1930s and 1940s. Zora Neale Hurston titled a play Color Struck in 1926, and she is often credited with coining or popularizing the word — but a play title presupposes a phrase already in circulation, and the credit is not supported. What Hurston did was put an existing accusation on a stage. Two further corrections: the term should not be pushed back into slavery or the nineteenth century, because the practice of colorism is much older than the word and there is no attestation before the 1920s; and colorstruck is not a synonym for colorism, a separate and later coinage generally credited to Alice Walker in 1982. Colorstruck names a person. Colorism names a system.
1926
Hurston's play Color Struck appears in the single issue of Fire!!
1929
Walter Winchell's syndicated column glosses the term for a general readership as current Harlem speech
1945
Drake and Cayton record it in Black Metropolis as standing Bronzeville vocabulary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black American, nationwide; documented in Southern Black speech and in Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville by the 1920s and 1930s · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Americans about one another; a charge brought inside the community and almost never claimed by the person it describes
$COLORSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring100 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
52/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1926
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston — Color Struck — play, in Fire!! · Nov 1926
Second prize for drama in the Opportunity literary contest; the title uses the phrase without stopping to explain it
■
St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton — Black Metropolis — book · 1945
p. 496; Black sociologists recording the word as Bronzeville's own name for light-skin vanity
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston — Jonah's Gourd Vine — novel · 1934
p. 91; the phrase inside a full sentence of Black speech rather than on a title page
See also