the sensitivity of being blacker

dear bell hooks,

its an honour to finally write to you, you, whose name defies rules and order, you who is fed up with what is supposed to be. i believe that you have brought to my life what i did not have before, for before, i never had the courage to spit into somebody's thoughts and express the anger i feel inside. you liberated me.i do not say these words to flatter you, for perhaps i will never meet you, but i say them to liberate myself, of thoughts, feelings and chains that tie me up so tightly i can only smile politely for fear of crying out loud.i come from a society that is near-free of direct racism. until i travelled to my present country, i had not encountered the kinds of direct racism that i experience here. as such, your words on racist ideologies are new to me. however, i understand discrimination, ethnic discrimination, color discrimination among blacks, for I lived in a society of blacks only until I was more or less a grown woman. i understand black on black discrimination all too well, and like the child in toni morrison's bluest eye, i am the one who one day realised i was different because i was a shade darker than most of my friends, and i learnt early in life to regress and hide in the shadows. i come from a community where dark skinned people have a special place in childhood taunting games called mchongwano. in these games, there is a series of choice phrases used to shoo away the dark-skinned person - dark-skinned people are so black they do not have shadows, or so black, day turns into night when they walk into rooms, or so pitch black that it is possible to see their fingerprints on charcoal. but such games are taken as norm and fun, more like the 'yo mama' jokes/games in the african american community. we all grew up accepting these games, in fact, playing them, embracing them, laughing at ourselves.however, i have asked myself in the recent years, just how dangerously we have embraced white ideology. why do we automatically see ourselves as more beautiful and acceptable because of our skin-tones, why have black people generally bought into the concept of the ‘whiter the better’? and why oh why do i have to constantly be dragged into it? for every time dark skin is scoffed at, i feel it as if it were a personal insult. it does not matter if this takes place in the media, or in song, or in social circles i am part of.

it is our thought patterns of ourselves as black people that have led to such dire consequences as having dark skinned brothers and sisters trying to smear themselves with skin lightening creams, what ngugi wa thiongo so eloquently writes about in his stories, and in the process burning themselves and hurting themselves. often, it is something we experience within our own social groups, the slight disapproval because the many years in the sun has only managed to make you darker, the lack of 'fairness' of skin, that pumps new skin-cream products into the market, the flurry of it all! sometimes i play a game. i watch tv adverts in the hope of catching a really really dark alek wek like model being used to promote a beauty product, or being used as a mark of true beauty, or even in music videos, just one glimpse that we as black people are beginning to realize that we are one, and all beautiful. i lose all the time, but still i try. i remember listening to a radio programme on a local fm station. it was a late night show where callers were being encouraged to use the medium as a space for finding new love. the dj had people calling in to describe what kind of men/women they had in mind. most of those who called had one consistent demand: they must be light skinned! yo! imagine a poor teenage girl or boy sitting somewhere longing for love but never having the courage to go the route others were taking!in your books, specifically black looks and salvation, you suggest that black people have to learn to love themselves from inside. but i am in a society where black people have embraced the violence of oppression so much that it is spilling onto their ability to love and embrace each other. i am in a society where to be of a certain skin tone means people will want your blood at a certain period and point in time. i write this to you, not in a splurge of self-pity, but as an outsider. for i am outside of me as i write, me who has reached a stage in my life where i no longer matter. but certain issues have to be voiced, recorded. i believe if we want to fight the bigger monster called white supremacy that has made sure the black person's lot has remained at the level of destitute, that we have to love one another. but we are all so busy struggling to get better, richer, lighter, better, richer, lighter and standing in line to receive compliments. i trust that we should develop a new way of looking at ourselves, a new way of appreciating ourselves and a new way of understanding, so that the generation that comes after us may begin to understand how we survived in a system as vile as the one we live in now.

yours,

skinless