The Blacker the Berry...

What color are your emoji hands? I am thankful to be at a place in my life where I finally offend myself if I accidently use what Siri likes to call, “medium brown skin tone” instead of the blackety blackest of the brown people options. People tell me that I am actually not that dark, but I beg to differ. I am actively a smaller scale version of a leper of my family. As it turns out, I have my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, to thank for that. Ahh, genetics.

I have been hearing a lot about this “colorism” topic over the past couple of weeks, and I had already planned to address it, so I guess it was meant for such a time as this. This post is not a complaint of not being able to take photos with light/white people, or having to enhance the hell out of them so I don’t just look like floating eyes and teeth. And all of my Caucasian subscribers can relax. I am not referring to the obvious elephant shaped racial tension. Maybe another day, actually. I am talking about colorism amongst my own brown people. From what I understand, this is a black person issue worldwide; Brazil, DR, PR, India, Florida… sometimes your own are the worst critics.

Quick lesson on why I was able to name those other countries: ethnicity is more culture whereas race is geared toward the physical characteristics, i.e. Amara La Negra. I needed to share that for people who probably had no idea that black people existed in other countries besides the US, Africa, and the Caribbean Islands. A perfect example of this is a really good friend of mine who is biracial (half black and half white) but fully Latina. Both sides of her family are Spanish speaking, making her Afro-Latina. 

You’re welcome.

Anyway, a very watered down backstory: I grew up not only in a white neighborhood and school, but also as pretty much the darkest of my family. A literal black sheep in a sea of 95-100% of light brights of all kinds; whites, khakis and brown paper bags. I was plagued with THE most colossal complex and insecurity that took me the better part of 20-something years to reverse. Not only was I the blackest in most rooms, but I also, according to surrounding brown people, talked the “whitest” (which in real life is called ENUNCIATION). I didn’t know how it felt for a little boy to have a crush on me because they did not particularly seek out black girls, I didn’t know how it felt to love myself or my skin because I felt so insanely different that I just wished I could blend with everyone else around me. So imagine my outrage when I see fellow black people defecating on the idea of a dark brown woman or child being beautiful.

There is a fascination with “redbones” and mixed chicks in my culture; and while I am not mad at it, the implication that anything other than that is any less beautiful is disheartening. Ask Chris Brown, who specifies light skin only in his VIP and sings about women with “good hair” (which we all know who he was referencing), or Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, or Lil Baby (whoever tf that guy is) who, very explicitly, speaks and raps about how unattractive and inferior darker women and children are. You know who are fascinated with us black women? Rich, white, elderly men. I feel that is more of a fetish, though.

This is one reason I am open to other races. If black women are at the bottom of the world’s “desire” totem pole, I must be in the molten magma under the earth. Despite the discrimination us chocolate folk face, especially at the hands of our own kind, I LOVE being black. I haven’t always, but I do now! I had to learn self-love manually, because the way I was brought up was not conducive to little green-black girls like myself. But I love my culture; I love my people, my skin. 

I can’t wait to have a chocolate child of my own. She will know a love that I wish I found earlier (because I have no energy for a little boy). And if I wasn’t black, or even as black as I am, I think I would wholeheartedly wish that I was…