Identity|Racism
How I Learned The Meaning of Skin
A brief reflection on an entitled life
I never paid much attention to the colour of my skin, probably because it is so damn white. Pinkish-beige actually, kind of light eggshellish, not the strong-shell tan, or the weak alabaster you find broken as you open the box. A colour of nothing special, just a bland, ‘entitlement’ shade of white girls. When I was very young, I didn’t even know about skin. Except it tore on concrete and grew back hidden under bandaids stuck on by my mother.
Neither my friends nor I noticed we had the same pasty faces and pudgy white bodies. We were kids. Cheeky, dirty-kneed, and careless, mostly well-behaved. We giggled and ran and chased boys around the playground. Play and fun crafted our kinship and tribes, not names and not skin.
When “Priscilla the new girl” started second grade, the most fascinating thing about her was her hair. Ours was straight, mousey-brown and thin. It grazed our shoulders in neat bobs or was scraped back into two unimaginative pigtails, tied with a school-green ribbon. However, Priscilla-the-new-girl’s hair was braided into a dozen audacious plaits that covered her entire head. I had not seen anything so different and so daring. The lilting cadence of her voice conjured sunshine, palm trees, and golden…
