Popular UK influencers have come under fire this week for a series of colourist tweets made in the past have resurfaced onto twitter.

Major names such as Stormzy, Lippy Lickshot, Nella Rose and many more have all been involved in this incident with several of them coming out to apologise to the public for their childish and immature behaviours of the past.

The topic of colourism has steadily become more relevant since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Colourism is prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

Twitter account @popinghottea created a thread addressing all of the colourist tweets coming from the various UK influencers.

WNOL spoke to a couple of individuals from the social media platform, Twitter, who recounted to us the troubles they went through dealing with colourism throughout their childhood.

Anonymous, 21

“I was fairly young when I started to use social media and browse the internet, but it didn’t stop me from experiencing the harsh reality of colourism on and off the internet. I remember in schools white students would call me names such as ‘blick’ and even go as far to put me in-between two other white students and call us and ‘inside out oreos’.

I account other moments where rooms would go dark, usually during drama class or watching something on the whiteboard, and many would shout “where is *my name*, we can only see his eyes’.”

Those tweets made by the influencers made me realise, that I was not the only one suffering this abuse and others received it too. However, the fact that they were at the time promoting this sort of content showed the lack of support for black people, who were really going through it.

As of right now only a couple of influencers have come out of hiding to apologise for their wrongdoings.

Nella Rose addressing the drama…

(Image source: courtesy of Michael Patcha)