Skinfolk

Quick meaning: Skinfolk is a noun meaning (uncommon) People who share the same skin color (race) with one another, especially when they are not otherwise closely associated or similar.

Meaning

(uncommon) People who share the same skin color (race) with one another, especially when they are not otherwise closely associated or similar.

Example Sentences

“As the saying goes, not everyone who's our skinfolk is our kinfolk,” James would quip, and “it's more important to have a brother or sister in Christ than a brother or sister in skin.

2022, Willie Jones (quoted in The Atlantic But as Jones’s career launched, he was disappointed not to find artists who looked like him. “I didn’t have too many other skinfolk to relate to, honestly, in the mainstream country realm,” he told me, “until I started really digging.”

It was, in part, this designation that Zora Neale Hurston sought to clarify with the distinction between "kinfolk" and "skinfolk" where one could imagine that all of one's skinfolk were not one's kinfolk (or lacked a good brain) and gave the skinfolk a bad name (Hurston, 1942).

Feminist analyses, critical in thinking through these myths of identity, have emphasized the methodological complications in being “skinfolk” but not necessarily “kinfolk,” to use Brackette Williams's trenchant distinction (1996), while reminding us also of the value of researchers who may be kinfolk in their depth of connection and commitment even if they are not skinfolk (Narayan 1993).

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include race, spacekin, blondism, population, gens, kinterm.

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