Beyoncé’s father Matthew Knowles claims singer is only successful because she has ‘lighter skin’

​Beyoncé’s father Matthew Knowles has put his daughter’s success down to the colour of her skin.

Knowles has claimed that black singers are more likely to get played on the radio and find fame if they have a paler complexion.

Speaking to Ebony magazine he said: “When it comes to black females, who are the people who get their music played on pop radio?

“Mariah Carey, Rihanna, the female rapper Nicki Minaj, my kids, and what do they all have in common?”

Asked if it was because they had lighter skin, Knowles replied: “Do you think that’s an accident?”

Knowles – who managed Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams in Destiny’s Child – was speaking to promote his book, Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, in which he admits to being guilty of ‘colourism’ when he was younger.

He revealed that he used to date white women as he had been conditioned to do so and initially thought his ex-wife, and Beyoncé’s mother Tina, was white.

He said: “I used to date mainly white women or very high-complexion black women that looked white.

“I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was white. Later I found out that she wasn't, and she was actually very much in-tune with her blackness.

He continued: “I had been conditioned from childhood. With eroticised rage, there was actual rage in me as a black man, and I saw the white females as a way, subconsciously, as getting even or getting back.”

His comments were dismissed by some who claimed Beyonce is “popular” because she has “talent” and “not because of the colour of her skin”.