![]() This idea was nonexistent until I started to see actresses such as Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o, Emmy Award Winner Viola Davis, and supermodel Nyakim Gatwech celebrated. There were no dark-skinned black women that I could look up to and say, yes she is beautiful on her own accord. For a long time, I aspired to achieve standards of white beauty. I noticed that in popular movies and tv shows the “token black” character was almost never my shade, but lighter on the “spectrum of blackness”. Having a super large smile with a gap in the middle of my teeth, a rather big nose, and my darker skin, I was not seen as a beauty queen. It didn’t help that there were beliefs that echoed in the media that outcast me. ![]() Self-consciousness crawled in as if I needed anything more to diminish my confidence as a teenager. I contemplated, what was with this obsession with my skin? What was so wrong with being dark? Boys in school joked that they would never have kids with dark-skinned girls. I mean, who else to give this nickname to but the Dark skin girl? Jokes were thrown around constantly, only I didn’t find humor in their words, only annoyance. ![]() ![]() In high school, my ninth grade year, I was given the uninvited nickname of Hutu, after our class watched the devastating film Rwanda. ![]()
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