I have a friend who is in his late 80s. He is an African-American man. He is old enough to have grown up through the Jim Crow laws and the “separate, but equal days.” He made a statement regarding my best friend and I. My best friend is light-skinned and I am darker skinned. He compared the two stating that one was better than the other.
He shared how he used to feel bad about his complexion. He is brown skinned. He asked the question if we could be White, my friend and I, would we. We both told him no. We felt bad for him because he had been indoctrinated with the ideal that he was less than because of the texture of his hair, skin color, and size of his lips and nose.
I shared how I loved my skin, and how at one point in my life as a child I wanted to be darker. It was when I was really young. I remembered watching a Ms. Universe pageant where they had a really beautiful girl who was very dark-skinned much darker than me. She was so beautiful to me that I wanted to look like her.
At that point, I shared how the self-hate that my friend had adopted is a learned behavior to compare one color to the next and put one or the other down. That isn’t the way it is unless we believe it. When we believe it we add power to it. He sort of paused at that and took it in.
It was fascinating to him the unity that I and my best friend had before him. This is a common strand of self hate and inferiority that has been through out African American culture for decades and sadly still causes shame and hurt among many who are ignorant of their own worth as well as the worth of their brothers and sisters.
It is a person who is amazingly insecure who can ascribe her own worth off of being light skinned and a person who is insecure who can ascribe her lack of worth off of being dark skinned alone. Surely we have more to offer as a people besides our skin tone which is beautiful I must say. The dark, the light, the brown, and all of the in betweens.
I am a little partial as I should be in the vein of loving myself toward my color of skin seeing how dark is the skin that I am in. I love my skin. I love how it changes colors in different light. It looks amazing to me, but I also can appreciate the beauty in all colors. I love the richness of the darkest darks, and the beautiful tents of lighter also. We as a people are a rainbow of beauty who’s culture is emulated by many.
What do you love about our culture?
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