I’ll be honest, the following is quite uncomfortable to write. However, other than vent/make sense of it, I wanted to help deconstruct a problem.
So this past Saturday my mom sees me and says: “Oh no, you’re getting darker”. Implying that being darker is bad. That one sentence disrupted a lot in mind. So, now I’m going to talking about colorism.
Being Haitian, colorism is unfortunately…common. I know it’s something a lot of Black folks don’t talk about. But we have to. I’ve talked with my mom about this ugly thing created by whiteness & proximity to it before. But I failed somewhere. Rather I feel like I failed. I know that this is her mess but I can’t help shake the feeling.
I spoke to her this Monday morning in a better frame of mind regarding her words. She deflected/avoided it entirely…as she’s been doing since her nearly 60 years of live. See my family calls out each other on BS, so that’s not sufficient. I’m not here to demonize her in anyway. But what makes this worse is my mom is a lighter skin Black woman. So, the hurt cuts deep.
What’s unfortunate is that this is so embedded in us and multifaceted. Many assume they’re doing nothing good. It…
