Colorism conversations for me are always really interesting because the way that
I grew up was, 'you need to be darker'.
Really?
Everyone in my family wants to be darker.
I'm all about being darker. I didn't realise this until my teens though.
Like when I went to Grenada and like I got a really nice, healthy, dark tan.
I felt like my skin was glowing.
Right, I just …
Feeling beautiful.
Yes!
There was this picture of a couple of rappers, it was like Jay-Z, Diddy, Swizz Beatz, somebody else,
at a table and they were talking about like what excellence
looks like in all of their women.
You had Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Cassie …
All very light-skinned so clearly, there's an association with like being high-class
and looking a certain way and I know for me like, I was very urged to …
This idea of like a messy bun, like throwing your hair in a messy bun,
and I used to have hair, like more than this.
So like putting my hair in a messy bun and putting on sweats and going outside,
I couldn't do that, because if I do that as a darker skin woman
with my hair like that, then somebody might think I was homeless.
Or somebody would think like, oh sure she didn't shower today
or whatever.
The lighter you are and the more polished you look is
definitely associated with, you know, more money.
My family c omes from an ethnicity call Garifuna and we're a mixture of West African and Arawakan people.
In our home country of Guatemala there's a lot of Indigenous folks and
Garifuna folks together and usually they get together they have mulatto
like basically biracial children and that was always seen as beautiful.
Having that overall really shaped the way I viewed myself
and feeling that I was never really beautiful in my skin.
So I had to literally seek that out on myself to love my melanin.
My two best friends are much lighter than me, right?
So I've been standing next to my friends and people have literally not said hello to me
because they are not seeing me.
People literally ignore dark-skinned women, particularly fat dark-skinned women,
particularly fat dark women that don't have no hair.
Me! You know what I am saying, like …
I know that when I'm being called light-skinned, there's somebody's tr ying to holler at me or whatever.
It's a compliment, but it's uncomfortable for me to be called light skinned
because it's like, you're calling me … Are you saying I'm different from you?
You're saying I am not … You're excluding me from a community.
It's more of like a dismissal?
Yeah.
And being black and white, like I'm not gonna not tell you my mother is white
but I am not white, I am not halfway, I am a black woman.
I don't like that where it's separated by skin tones,
when I could have had two black parents
and been this skin tone.
I am hearing a lot about this European, or Eurocentric, standard of beauty
but I'm also sometimes offended when people on the colour spectrum would question my …
Sort of commitment to the race.
I think there's a part of me that also resents if someone said well,
if you're not natural, you didn't do this which I feel like I'm natural,
I didn't have any chemical in my hair but I decided, yeah I want to blow dry my hair.
And that doesn't make me any less than one of my sisters who's deciding something else.
My first memory of race, I would say has been about colours
in which i think is interesting because I think it was me asking my mom
if she was white which I thought was really interesting and then she told me the
first memory she remembers was when I was at a park and I was playing with
these kids and then like the older sister came over and she was like,
no, don't play with her because she's brown.
The colour spectrum is something that
we have to deal with if we want to move forward at all,
it's like, it hurts people.
We have to understand that we didn't originally create this type of animosity
we didn't create this like kind of intense relations with each other.
It was brought upon us.
So even if it was here for African Americans in the US
or if it is in, you know, Central or South America or in the Caribbean is like
this is something that was structured to be able to divide and conquer.
So are we saying that it's on lighter skinned people to
open doors or make spaces?
Like, are we saying that we don't collectively have a power to make our own space?
I think it's a joint effort.
I guess as far as looking towards the future,
we have these examples of what like Jordan Peele just released his film,
he has Lupita Nyong'o as a lead, you have people like
even in these type of conversations, people talk about Beyoncé but now people are like
what about Kelly though?
Like this idea of like bringing darker women
to the forefront like that is present, like in the families we create,
we have to make sure that we enforce that self-love and then also
make sure that we don't ask people to succumb to your centric standards of beauty
or like influencing it.
We are two black women experiencing something together.
My way of showing up for you is if I need to put my body on the line,
I am putting my body on the line.
The way that you're disrupting systems of
oppression is making sure people acknowledge my humanity,
and we finna do this together.