The Cost To Be White

I don’t remember ever wanting to be white. I remember wanting to be treated like the white girls in the movies were treated. I remember the darker skinned girls in my classes from Kindergarten to Senior year being made fun of for being too dark.

I remember there being a time where my acne was horrific along with my excema (skin rashes) and hyperpigmentation is real–I am mocha chocolate dark and all these big black marks on my face. I was mortified.

My mom, her sisters and my grandmother told me to “work on the dark spots” and they would fade away. I found out about skin lightening creams because I wanted my dark marks to go away.

Skin lightening is not a new concept and your skin ‘lightens’ because the component in the cream targets pigmentation and in essence, erases it. Ergo, your skin is lighter. There are creams produced by different companies in this $1 billion dollar plus industry. Hyperpigmentation is a struggle for African American women and it does take a toll on your self-esteem.

However, the darker side to this can be seen in high profile celebrities like Lil Kim, Michael Jackson and Sammy Sosa–but as far away as our Motherland of Africa. Women are using corrosive materials or creams with corrosive ingredients to remove all traces of their pigmentation, yea their blackness to meet the white Western esthetic.

Blackness makes whiteness uncomfortable. Blackness reminds whiteness it is not a standard, or the only spectrum in the universe. Blackness, the features which are an aberration to whiteness, is demanded by the acceptance of white supremacy to remove it. In removing it, you are more acceptable, less a reminder of the ancestry stolen from and slaughtered–freely able to navigate white supremacy as an acceptable, docile, palatable Negro.

In attempting to be white will only cost you everything that being black will ever mean. It means rejecting everything about all you come from, confirming the lie of white supremacy that black, anything black, is inferior, ugly, and abhorrent.

The cost to be white is to give up everything black.

Culture.

Progress.

History.

Family.

Tradition.

The reason white supremacy, white nationalism hates blackness is because we can’t be eradicated. It had dominant traits–it is whiteness that is the abhorration. The dark eyes, skin, thick lips—that’s all us.

All us…and besides, this melanin was here first. You think we will abandon that for the advantage of being white?

Nall. We will not have it.

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