The experiences of African Americans provide an understanding of issues such as racism, shadism, gender, class, and discrimination. This study provides new insight on shadism and the resistance of female by focusing on the positive and negative outcomes and their causes in four novels by the esteemed African American novelist Toni Morrison. These novels are Paradise, Beloved, A Mercy, and The Bluest Eye. The study analyzes these novels with the ultimate aim of examining concepts of shadism and female’s resistance within the African American community. The analysis indicates that slavery had a profound effect on the way that African Americans related to each other. In particular, the preferences provided to light-skinned Americans created hatred between African Americans which led to the rise of shadism. This is manifested in Toni Morrison Paradise, where the concept of disallowing light-skinned blacks the opportunity to maintain the purity of their race and create an indigenous place is raised. Further, it was found that shadism created substantial trauma for African Americans, which manifested differently in the novels. In Beloved, there are instances where characters kill their children as a way of saving them from the evils of slavery and it is revealed that the acts of shadism contribute to healing as the characters have to confront their past individually and collectively throughout traumatic and narrative memory, embodied memory, and cultural memory. Further, solidarity and sisterhood can be viewed as a way of overcoming and preventing oppression like the women in A Mercy reveal, despite differences in origin, background, and belief. Also, in The Bluest Eye, the study demonstrates that shadism is not only related to race, but to the manner in which one or more constructed identities influence it through the lens of intersectionality; this happened mostly when a character tries to mimic or try to pass racially to white. Significantly, the study finds that the issue of whiteness and American identity are tools utilized to amplify discrimination against African Americans. Thus, shadism adopts the same ideological position as racism and increases inequalities in the African American community. Dealing with the issue of shadism requires focusing on changing people’s beliefs about race, whiteness, American identity, and class. Thus, changing misconceptions about race will play an important role in creating better, and more tolerant, communities.