In this age of nip, tuck, fill and photo shop it is difficult to know what is real and what is newly designed. This is hard for us regular sisters who just want to look and feel our best, but can’t call our neighbor the plastic surgeon on speed dial for a quick favor.
I’m not against those sisters that go under the knife in her quest of the perfect look, but let’s face it, some surgeries can go to far.
This article is inspired by my aunt who raised me up in a household with her own 6 other children. Our family shows generations of inter-racial mixing and even though we are census booked into the African-American category, my grandfathers are blonde with green eyes and my sisters and cousins from those same grandfathers sport kinky, black hair and Hershey chocolate skin. For us, it was never a big deal, and anytime anyone would dare try to make a big deal out of our skin color, my aunt would quickly point out to them how ignorant they sounded. We were Black, working class and no different from anyone else. Besides anytime we thought we were being funny and even attempted to crack a joke about someone’s skin color she’d say “you ain’t white and you will never be white and that’s the only skin privilege that matters in this world, so just stop it”. Game over.
So Imagine my shock when I learned how messed up some folks are about skin color especially black people. My Polly Anna dream burst quickly when I got into middle school and girls wanted to fight me just because they hated my skin color, I mean I was getting jumped by families of girls over this mess. I was like what?! Didn’t ya momma tell y’all that there ain’t no difference? Evidently the mothers of these girls didn’t get the memo either. I later grew to learn that my aunt was clearly ahead of her time because most of the women my aunts age (she’s in her 70′s now) had carried some serious pain over their own skin color and have passed those insecurities down. Check on any social networking site for example, my girl who has made such progress as a mother and business woman is a social media celebrity. Her name is Draya Michelle, and her Sodraya Instagram account would have thousand comment beefs about the color of her skin and why she has pictures of her light-skinned friends on her instagram account, these are beefs about her PICS!
Anyway, you get my point that we have a ways go in healing the skin divide. There is a such thing called Colorism. Yes there is an other ism: Colorism is skin color stratification (Okazawa Rey, Robinson, & Ward, 1987). It is “ a form of oppression that is expressed through the differential treatment of individuals and groups based on skin color.
Here’s part of my contribution toward the healing work. In this multi-part series, I will dig deep into reasons it’s hard to love the skin you’re in:
So I’ve already mentioned the color issue, and the unrealistic media expectations, here are a few more self-damning vices that stop us from Loving the Skin we are in:
1) Abuse : having your body misused or mistreated the hands of another causes long-term body image problems. Especially if it happened as a child, the repeated messages of the abuser get planted deep in the survivors psyche and unless you DO THE WORK to reverse that damage, it carries on and repeats itself in your future relationships. If this is you, do the work it takes to reverse that damage. It can be done, I’ve written about it here.
2) Depression: whether your depression is short-term,postpartum or you have long suffered from the blues that you just can’t shake or “don’t seem to let you go”,this can have a devastating effect on your own self-image. You can eye a person who is suffering from depression and has self-image issues by the way they either self-depricate and down themselves repeatedly, or they target it outward and criticize and downgrade others around them. They target people who appear to be succeeding at something they wish they could do or have. 
The depressed one is good at giving others the side eye, she thinks everything is a conspiracy against her. She has trust issues with everybody because she was hurt by people she trusted. Her barometer is off so she is not sure of herself, or you. The point here is that she doesn’t see things in most positive light, even her own self.
3) Unforgiveness: Holding on to or replaying events, decisions or situations that happened in the past are literally weighing you down. some of us can get so caught up in the unforgiveness loop that it changes the character of who we are. the unforgiveness not only affects the way we relate to others but the tape replays in our own dialogue and it turns on us! So the analogy that unforgiveness is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die is true. Yes, it was bad, yes it hurt, yes it shouldn’t have happened. Now what are you gonna do? Don’t wallow in it any longer than you have already. The only time you can think about it is if you are thinking of a way to turn it around. How can you turn that mess into your message? What is the opportunity in that chaos? What did you learn about yourself in that mess? This is your work.
This loving the skin you’re in series will be ongoing. The next installment will cover how to identify self – hating behaviors in yourself and others.
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