For the longest time I had this question brewing like a storm in the farthest corner of my mind – Why are we, as brown people, so hostile to the colour ‘brown’? Why do we feel the need to overstep personal boundaries and throw scheming remarks at the little dark-skinned girl at a social event, asking her why she’s tanned so much lately?
I, for one, cannot count how many times I’ve been told to avoid wearing bright colours just because they make my skin look even duskier. I’ve also had the privilege of being prescribed multiple skin-whitening products by well-wishing allies who firmly believed that my dusky skin complexion was nothing but a misfortune. A misfortune that took me over a decade to come to terms with. But when you grow up surrounded by people who wouldn’t stop short of calling you filthy just because of your skin tone, you begin to question whether it’s a misfortune or a curse.
Have we truly dipped so low beneath the surface of self-sabotage, that we can’t even recognize the straining hands of our ancestors? Our multiracial ancestry has endowed us with an eclectic community with such diverse features and variegated skin complexions, and yet here we are pulling out all the stops to snuff out the polarity. We treat it like The Great Plague. But what we fail to comprehend is that the anomaly in our blood is what makes us unique by all odds.
It is the cut and dried truth that the colour of her skin is linked to a woman’s beauty. She’s pretty. But such a shame she’s dark – the mass of misery these words held for me was much more irksome than the foul rage I felt when an advocate of the fair skin revolution told me I wasn’t showering well enough because I looked filthy. The matrimonial business is particularly unforgiving when it comes to choosing baits for their money-makers. The market will never cater to dark skins because a darkskin woman will unfortunately never be the first choice for marriage. Brown parents would rather trade their humanity than marry their beloved son to a woman who has skin darker than the norm. Heaven forbid that their grandchildren turn out like the mother. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the value of women has reached such woeful depths that they’re reduced to just their ability to be sold to the marriage market regardless of the heaps of accomplishments they’ve garnered.
Colorism has always acted as the thorn in the flesh, but the thorn cuts even deeper when it’s your own people saying you’re not worthy. In this fashionable age of free-thinkers, we still have the ill fortune of seeing dark-skin makeup on fair-skinned actresses.
But our own animosity that dimmed the genius of so many brown women, doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for the male actors on the darker side. In a country where the majority of the people have brown skin, it’s agitating to see such little media representation of bronzed women.
That’s why growing up, I found myself warding tremendous admiration for African-American women.
My introduction to Black excellence came about through my mother. She had an affinity for 90s pop music and was gracious enough to pass the obsession on to me. That obsession gave birth to the reverence for black female artists like Sade, Whitney Houston, Aaliyah, Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Beyonce and so forth. It was thrilling to see such passionate women of colour embrace their melanin with such high regard for their ethnicity. In a white dominated field, especially at a time when the media became a principal venue for race hatred and xenophobia, these women proudly laid bare their souls in the mould of their craft and inspired an entire generation of black women. Nina Simone, in one of her interviews, talked about the significance of her pushing the agenda of Black power so often. In her words – “I had no choice. To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world – Black people.” The African American singer proceeded to say with unyielding conviction- “My job is to somehow make them curious enough, by hook or by crook, to get more aware of themselves and where they came from.”
To this day black women have shown rigid solidarity and serenity in their own beauty, despite the challenges that they face. I often wonder what it is that’s stopping a brown woman from feeling confident in their own skin.
What is it that holds her back from flaunting her skin that gleams like gold when the sunbeams skim a gentle kiss over it? Perhaps we fear the melanin in our skin which resembles the soil that created Adam. Or perhaps it’s because we stand wrapped-up in chains inside a house made of glass – shackled by the barriers of society, but not blind to the pristine beauty that we possess.