Skin Color and Educational Inequality among Black Individuals of the Anglophone Caribbean

Colorism, a form of racialized embodied capital, shapes structural opportunities and mobility within and across racial groups. In the Anglophone Caribbean, research on colorism has largely focused on Jamaica, which has precluded broader theoretical and empirical insights into the profound stratifying power of skin color. This study addresses this gap by analyzing data from the 2014 and 2016 AmericasBarometer social surveys to examine how skin color has impacted educational inequality among self-identified Black individuals across nine Anglophone Caribbean countries. The findings show that skin color significantly predicted educational attainment in all countries except St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Lucia; the strongest effects of colorism were observed in Jamaica and the weakest in the Bahamas. By expanding the geographic scope of existing research to the Anglophone Caribbean, this study reveals how colorism continues to shape mobility and opportunity. Specifically, it challenges the prevailing notion in the region that colorism is solely a colonial legacy by demonstrating substantial cross-national variation in its association with educational attainment. This suggests that contemporary institutional and policy contexts condition the reproduction of color hierarchies.