It's Not All White

I hopped on my Northern Line tube train this morning and I saw an African woman who literally made me feel quite ill. Her face was just butchered. Peeling, scaling, red, bumps, and totally discoloured.

I know the difference between a skin rash and damaged skin from too much bleaching. Her hands were also discoloured as was her neck. She always looked down and buried her head as far down into her wide turtleneck sweater as she could. I thought to myself, when you had your dark skin were you walking around with your head down and buried like that? I bet she wishes she had left the creams and god knows what else she used, well and truly alone. Just from looking at her, the damage looked permanent. I don't know how many shades she had gone down to, but they were shades of pink and brown, and definitely not the lighter hue she had hoped for. I feel quite ill just remembering this woman as I write this.

She had 2 mixed race beautiful baby twins girls with her, with fair skin and curly hair. As I looked at the only twin that was awake and eating her Cheese and Onion flavoured crisps, I wondered did this woman purposefully go out find a white man to pro-create with so she wouldn't have dark skinned children? And you know something, it wouldn't surprise me if she actually did. From the skin to the children, I just looked at her as somebody who didn't like herself at all, like being black was a mistake and the only way to try and make amends was make sure her children were 'perfect' in her eyes. [A little heavy thinking for a tube journey this morning I know], but looking at this woman reminded me just how real our issues are about ourselves.

There's a distinct difference to using lightening creams to fade dark marks [hyper pigmentation] compared to using it on your whole face or body to change your skin colour and/or swallow pills to lighten up.

What is really going through the minds of these people that do this?

I don't even know what point I want to make in this blog to be honest, because the issues about self hate, light skin and dark skin, have been discussed over and over again in our community and nothing ever changes. Some people are fine and have no problem or issue with their skin colour and those of who they date. Then there are others that must date lighter or the one with the silky textured hair hoping that this will produce the perfect specimen of a child, simply forgetting that black genes can come out any which way possible, and that you may not always get what you hoped for.

I do often wonder if slavery didn't happen would there still be the same mentality surrounding the dark vs. light issue, and that any hair type other than a kinky 4B afro type of hair was considered 'good hair'? I think single handedly by ourselves we at some point would have learned to hate ourselves to the extreme of bleaching without historical events playing a part in people's ways of thinking. It is what it is, but let's not forget that Indians and Japanese also desire lighter skin tones too, it's not just black people.

Is it a white thing or just a light thing? People who want to remain black [culturally] but just desire lighter skin tones as opposed to wanting to be an all round white person right down to features and lifestyle? I personally feel that in situations like this, white people are given too much credit to validate our reasons to fuck up. "When all else fails, blame the white man" The white man is the reason we have so many men in the prison system. The white man degraded us so much during slavery and today that we despise our hair texture and chemically alter it. The white man doesn't want me to succeed, so that's why my grades are slipping and I can't get a job. The treatment of us by the white men are the causes of many problems today in our communities.

Geez Louise! There is no power in the blame culture. In fact it's quite weak. What if all of the above were proven to be 100% true, that the white man was to blame for pretty much every problem that we have today, then what is that saying about us as a people in 2008? Yes, some people today still do blame whites for their own personal under achievements in life, are we still going to continue down this path for another 400 years of self hatred, not just toward ourselves but to one another also? In London the police force has a special division called Operation Trident which is specifically for black on black gun crime. I may separate this topic out on another blog one day, but how can we make up 2% of the UK population and a majority of crime where the victims are black, the perpetrators are also black in a nation where handguns aren't even legal?

From colour issues, to the absentee father epidemic, to HIV/AIDS, to obesity, to prison statistics, to killing one another...

We got some serious issues...

Where the hell do we start?