More childhood experiences with colorism.
So I got a lovely email from Moury Minhaz in response to this post I wrote about what its like to not feel pretty as a little brown girl, and she said I could publish it here.
Thank you for that post on shadism. It hit a bit too close to home, then a gain, it does for most of us brown girls, doesn’t it? Reading it made me anxious and my stomach was doing that thing where it feels like there is a black hole forming in it. I am in my mid twenties now and up until maybe three years ago I still felt undesirable, and frankly, I still feel that way sometimes. So much self pep talk went on before I felt like I am beautiful. …I still find myself giving myself the pep talk sometimes.
A good chunk on my childhood was spent in Japan, where of course I was always the only dark individual in our grade or sometimes in the whole entires school. Though I loved growing up in Japan and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world… there were some terrible times too. Once I was told by my classmate not to touch her baby sister (she brought her baby sister to the play ground) because she didn’t want her sister to turn black like me. Now that I look back on it, I think, “ah well, kids can be cruel they don’t know what they are talking about,” but nevertheless me at that time felt like subhuman.
White girls do have it easy. Their awkward phase doesn’t have an added layer of what is it like to grow up in a society where lightness is revered, and you know very well we are not just talking about the western society. Our own people judge us for being a shade or two darker. I cannot tell you how many times relatives/family friends have commented on my skin tone when I was back in motherland, visiting with my cousin who is a bit lighter shade. “You are beautiful but don’t stay out in the sun too long, you are already ‘shamla’. Be more like her, she has such a creamy complexion.” You know that word that they use to describe not so light skinned girls, shamla (in bengali at least), it like a terrible branding on brown girls. Instantly taken down a notch and discredited. I cannot count how many times I have heard my aunties talk about potential bride for some dude in their family, “she is a doctor, getting her PhD. She cooks well, she is sweet, she sings… but she’s dark.” How frustrating.
Thanks for that, Moury.
This shit runs deep.
Why aren’t little brown girls praised as much as little white girls?
So I just watched that documentary on shadeism that I reblogged from espirit-follet, and my head hurts and my heart aches.
Watching that little girl look at her own beautiful skin and hearing her talk about how ugly it was… pointing at the white models and not the black ones, talking about her aunt’s lighter skin and how different it is to her own…
You know, I never once thought of myself as a pretty child. Pretty was my white friends, my black friends and me, we were just there. Not very feminine, not like the white girls. Not desirable, not particularly popular with the boys the way the white girls were. I remember the time my friend Julia told me that she thought I was the prettiest girl she knew, and it floored me. First time anyone had ever told me I was pretty. I was eleven.
I look back on pictures, and I think to myself, why? I was a gorgeous kid. I had these big lovely brown eyes, black hair, golden skin, I was smart as a button, and very, very funny. And I look at the pictures of my white friends, and I don’t see much of a difference, other than our races. So why did they receive praise, and why didn’t I? I vivdly remember one incident at a slumber party: my best friend, a blonde white girl, told me that she was naturally beautiful, that she knew this, and that some people weren’t as lucky as her. And I remember thinking, how does she know that? Where does someone obtain that kind of knowledge? How is she so confident and secure in that knowledge? Someone must have told her. And she believed it? Because by the time I was eleven, I was so used to thinking of myself as the dirty, runty little brown kid, I refused to believe someone when they did praise me.
The other black and brown girls I knew as a child — many of them learned to think of themselves as beautiful later on in life. And yes, I know that this is a universal experience, every girl goes through some kind of ugly duckling stage or another, hopefully emerging in late adolescence with a sudden reserve self-confidence — but no white girl goes through that journey the way we went through it. Because we have to come to terms with our race, not just our awkward bodies. We have to combat what other people can and will say about what certain features of our bodies. Our hair texture, the shape of our eyes, our dark or light skin, the multitude of shades that are painted on our bodies, our hairiness or lack of hair, our size, our breasts, our hips, our lips, our butts.
Its a battle white girls don’t have to go through. There are all sorts of pressures on every woman in our society, but we have many, many more. Childhood and adolescence and womanhood are battlefields for us, and it can be a struggle to continue to think of ourselves as desirable, as female, as pretty.
No wonder so many of us don’t make it.
Submitted by p-p-panty
This short TV documentary is an introduction to the issue of shadeism, the discrimination that exists between the lighter-skinned and darker-skinned members of the same community. This documentary short looks specifically at how it affects young womyn within the African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas. Through the eyes and words of 5 young womyn and 1 little girl - all females of colour - the film takes us into the thoughts and experiences of each. Overall, ‘Shadeism’ explores where shadeism comes from, how it directly affects us as womyn of colour, and ultimately, begins to explore how we can move forward through dialogue and discussion.
reblog. Made by Nayani Thiyagarajah.
oh shit. gon watch this.
Source: vimeo.com
