In Other People's Skin, Tracy Price-Thompson and TaRessa Stovall, along with fellow authors Elizabeth Atkins and Desiree Cooper, take on one of the most controversial topics within the African-American community: the self-hatred caused by intra-racial prejudice and the ongoing obsession with skin tone and hair texture. In other words, the skin/hair thang among black women.

It begins with TaRessa Stovall's "My People, My People," in which a successful advertising executive acquires firsthand knowledge of prejudice when her clients insist on using light- rather than dark-skinned...