#Light skinned black baby skin
I want to make sure that my child comes out with lighter skin so that they will be prettier and better than I am.” What they are saying at the most basic level is, “I don’t like my skin color, it is undesirable. When Black girls make comments like, “I want to have a light-skinned baby”, they are basically consciously or subconsciously rejecting vital parts of their self and their identity. My main concern, is the affects this type of thinking has on these teenage girls self-esteem, self-value and self-worth. I could go into the many different theories behind this sort of thinking, including brainwashing by the media, European standards of beauty and what is called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, but those are all too extensive topics to cover here. These were more the exception than the rule, but a common enough trend to cause deep contemplating for not only Black people, but other people of color and those who teach, counsel or mentor people of color.Īfter watching that thought provoking show, I was a bit alarmed to have two of my teenage students basically say, “I don’t like my complexion and don’t want to have kids that look like me.” Some of the things that stuck out to me during the show, was how some darker skinned Blacks often did not like their skin tone and wanted lighter skin and how some lighter skinned Blacks didn’t want to identify with being Black at all. Not because it was the first time I had ever heard Black teens make that comment, but because just on Sunday night I had watched CNN’s Who is Black in America with Soledad O’Brien, which explored colorism and identity in the Black community. The other two girls quickly jumped in and said, “That’s because she is already light-skinned.” She replied with the sensible answer, that she didn’t care how her kids came out.
I then turned to the the Asian-Haitian-American girl and asked her if she too wanted to have light-skinned children.
She didn’t say that she wants to marry a loving man and have healthy children, but that she wants to have a light-skinned baby.īefore I could comment, the African-American girl in the group (she’s about copper complected) quickly agreed with her (although her current boyfriend is deep chestnut complected), that she too wanted light-skinned babies. Today in a small group of teenage girls that consisted of one Asian-Haitian-American female, one Haitian-American female and one African-American female, seemingly out of nowhere, the Haitian-American (a chestnut complected girl) blurted out, “I date White boys because I want to have a light-skinned baby.”
0 kommentar(er)
