Keke Palmer is many things, among them an actor, Emmy award winner, and meme queen. She has been acting since she was a child and starred in 2006’s Akeelah and the Bee and Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP, which ran from 2008 until 2011. Now 28, she stars in Oscar-winner Jordan Peele’s Nope opposite Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya. She is hardly what you’d call a “new face” in Hollywood.

Over the weekend, her rise from child star to certified A-list was the subject of a tweet comparing Palmer’s popularity with that of Zendaya. Replying to a thread in which Teen Vogue‘s Aiyana Ishmael puzzled over comments branding Palmer as a “breakout star” despite her decades-long career, user @NBAgladiator mused that Zendaya, as a light-skinned Black woman, has had more mainstream success and recognition due to colorism in the industry. 

“This may be one of the clearest examples of how colorism plays out in Hollywood,” reads the tweet. “They were both child-stars, but their mainstream popularity is very different.”

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