Can we talk about colorism?

A couple weeks ago, I went on a cruise to the Bahamas with my sister and a few friends. I had a great time, and was drunk the entire time, sunup to sundown.

Anyways, one of the days I was on the boat, my friend and I were in the casino, getting our 10^th drink of the day. My friend is a gorgeous girl, who happens to be racially ambiguous. Anywho, we’re sitting at the bar, and this black man, who looks older than my father, approaches my friend and starts a conversation with her. I minded my business to give them some type of privacy. I shortly found out that my attempt to mind my business was pathetic because he asked me why I looked ‘so mean’. I was confused on how I ‘looked mean’ if I was just drinking my beverage and trying to give them privacy because he was trying to hit on her. As if he couldn’t get on my nerve further, he looks me dead in my face and says:

“You’re cute, too. Don’t think you’re not cute because you’re not light-skinned.”

Instead of trying to create a good impression to last on my friend, he decided to give me a backhanded ass compliment that insinuated that I thought I wasn’t beautiful. I had rather he told me I was ugly, instead. He tried to insinuate I had low self-esteem and that self-hatred oozed through my veins because the obvious difference in racial phenotype of my friend and me, despite him and I being the same skin tone.

If I’m being completely transparent, I’ve thought about this comment every-day after the cruise and it’s still on my mind three weeks later. Honestly, it left me with plenty of mixed emotions because I kept trying to figure out why he would say this to me, but I then figured out I didn’t need a reason to justify the disrespect, and nor did I need him to stamp me for beauty. I didn’t want to be wanted by him, but this comment made me think of the many struggles that I face as a dark-skinned black woman, more specifically in regards in colorism.

People like to pretend darker-skinned black women don’t suffer from colorism because that means they would have to eliminate their own bias and their own beliefs about us. That's like saying that I would have to be apart of the LGBTQ+ community to be knowledgeable about the issues they face in society, and only a fool would deny proof of these social inequalities, and it would be the same fool who perpetuates them the most.

When you’re the darkest child out of all your siblings, and you had people ask you if you’re adopted (despite me looking exactly like my parents), and people call you a burnt biscuit and say you look like an African booty scratcher, say you’re a "blackie" and constantly try to undermine your femininity (really your entire human existence) because the color of your skin, (which, by the way is completely random and based off genetics), it hurts. I will never forget, ten, fifteen, years ago, people placed a scarlet letter on my chest, when I was just a child, and were calling me different renditions of the color black just to remind me that I wasn’t light, as if it was crime to be dark-skinned. As if dark skin isn’t beautiful.

Within this constant division and hierarchy of fair-skinnedness and dark-skinnedness, it’s really to remind you that you will never have the same benefits or potential as ‘lightness’ that is maintained by this society, like there is no way to be beautiful and darker-skinned, like beauty is only in the eye of the fairest. To be completely transparent, there was one day when I questioned myself if beauty was truly in the eye of the fairest.

I now know the answer to that thought.

Colorism is a river that flows extensively, and it flowed so far out that people wanted to me to hate myself when I was a child: when I was new to the world, experiencing Earth for the first time and trying to create my own identity as a person, people constantly reminded me that I was darker. It’s not like people sat down and explained how society may treat me differently because I was darker, they just wanted to be evil and tease me about my skin, as if I had a disease. Now I would be lying if I said that there was no one who reassured me, but the negativity outweighed the positivity because of the common occurrence of the negative reinforcement.

Colorism is a river that flows extensively, and it flowed so far out that people wanted to me to hate myself when I was a child: when I was new to the world, experiencing Earth for the first time and trying to create my own identity as a person, people constantly reminded me that I was darker.

I know we’re currently riding a social wave of ‘diversity’ and ‘power to the melanin’ campaign, but as a person who always suffered at the butt of jokes about not standing too close to the sun, the ‘power to the melanin’ campaign has always felt performative and I’m tired of it. If I’m being honest, to celebrate a ‘chocolate’, ‘ebony’ woman loudly and proudly is a very recent phenomenon, but I still am skeptical of it all because subconscious behaviors of humans are always the loudest. Yes, I am saying that in my opinion, a colorist will always be a colorist.

To this day, I vividly remember everyone who consistently taunted me because the color of my skin. As the time I am writing this, I choose to forgive them. Although, I will always feel unsafe around colorists because colorism tosses out protection of me, life is more peaceful and beautiful when you realize people will be who they are because they hate themselves and that...has nothing to do with me. Overtime, I realized a few things about beauty, and I began to include myself in that category by looking at my own point of view and what I deemed as beautiful.

Check out my latest post here: Things I'm Doing In College to Set Me Up Financially After I Graduate

If you enjoyed this post, check out Why I Stopped Wearing Weave here.