Phylicia Rashad, a Tony Award winning actress and a star of The Cosby Show, said in a podcast interview that she grew up certain her sister was the beautiful one and she was not.
“I think if there was any competition that I felt, I always felt that Debbie was beautiful and I was not,” Rashad said.
The sister is Debbie Allen. Rashad was clear that she never saw her as a rival. What she carried was quieter than that, and harder to put down, and it followed her out of childhood and into her working life.
It came out in New York, years later, when the two of them were young women sharing an apartment. They had each gone out and bought the other a pair of earrings. The gifts opened a conversation, and in it Rashad finally said the thing out loud.
“I said to Deborah that I had always wanted to be beautiful, like her,” she said.
What came back was not what she expected.
“And she looks at me and says, ‘But you’re the beautiful one! I was always trying to be beautiful like you!'” Rashad said.
“And then we broke down and started crying!”
Two sisters, years of it each, both certain the other one had the thing she did not.
Allen has an explanation for where it started and it is not vanity. She says colorism did it, the household kind, the sort that gets taught inside a family rather than announced. Allen has also said she spent those same years wishing she looked more like her sister.
That is the part of this that is not about two famous women. Colorism is taught at close range, by people who love you, in sentences nobody writes down, and it decides which girl in a family gets called the pretty one. It keeps deciding long after she is grown. Both of these women built careers in front of cameras, and both of them spent years on the wrong side of a comparison that neither of them made.
