In Loving My Light Skin, I Hated Myself
Celebrating my proximity to whiteness wasn’t self-love, it was the product of centuries-old self-hate
Dear God,
Thank you for a good day today. Thank you for my Mommy and my Nana and my family. Thank you for waking me up and giving me life and for making the world pretty. And thank you for making me pretty and light-skinned. I love you. Good night.
As a young girl, I would recite a variation of that prayer every night before bed. With such an innocent and well-meaning disposition, I would thank God for the things that I was happy to have. I loved my family immensely, I loved playing outside, and I absolutely loved my light skin. God could have been unkind and made me much darker, I thought. What a shame it would have been, I imagined, to be picked on by the boys at school, to have short, kinky, nappy hair, and to be mean all the time. I rarely saw dark-skinned girls in beauty commercials or as the ‘it girl’ everyone wanted to date on television shows or in movies. I rarely saw dark-skinned girls with long, flowing hair. I rarely saw dark-skinned girls happy. They always seemed so angry, I thought.
I, on the other hand, was light. I saw the sun glimmer in my skin. I saw the potential of being more than just Black. I saw that my skin…
