The well-to-do black families who summer in the Oval have created their own insular society, with its own prejudices against dark-skinned blacks and its own snobbery about social climbers.

Midge L. Wilson, a professor at DePaul University who has studied interracial bias among blacks, said light-and dark-skinned blacks sometimes exhibit signs of discrimination against the other.

Two dark-skinned blacks were among five patients who achieved better than 75 percent repigmentation after an average of 19 treatments administered three times a week.

Light-skinned "upper-class" Brazilians often associated Samba with dark-skinned blacks because of its arrival from West Africa.

There's a Siskel and Ebert parody, a medley of bad auditions and a commercial for a black acting school "for dark-skinned blacks only."

Bond explained perceptions of white and black IQ differences with the tongue-in-cheek "theory" that "light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks."

Then there is the divisiveness of color consciousness - the friction between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks.

Danny Boy's parents were both dark-skinned blacks.

Ms. Morrison stayed on at Random House through the publication of "Tar Baby" in 1981, a novel about the clash of light and dark-skinned blacks in the West Indies.

The song "Straight and Nappy" goes to the heart of the film's concern with conflicts between light- and dark-skinned blacks on a college campus.