Traumatizing, Indeed!

I thought that dark skin people were the only ones suffering at the hands of our OWN people. I remember growing up and hearing, "she/he's so cute to be dark!" The famous one was my darker skinned girlfriends saying, "I'm gonna have a baby by a lightskin or white man so that it can be light!" I fell into that same thing! I am ashamed to say it but, I did. Most of my boyfriends were either mixed race or they passed the "paperbag test." Fortunately, I snapped out of that when it came time to have my child. He is a beautiful mixture of reds and browns and dark browns and I wouldn't have it any other way. Enough of me, I talked about this because Rihanna is discussing it in her latest interview in Instyle magazine. She says that growing up in the Barbados and being "lightskin" was difficult. She says, "“It made me angry; it made me want to fight in my younger years. Having lighter skin wasn’t a problem in my household, but it was when I went to school – which really confused me at first. For the first six years of school, I would go home traumatized. The harassment continued to my very last day of elementary school.”

Sidenote: To all the people who think that you must be light to be beautiful, I say that we come in all shades and all are beautiful. We are the few that can say that we come in all shades! People are dying to be our color! Love yourself and RESPECT yourself!