22/07/2022
In a global landscape where people have rightly pointed out how black women with lighter skin shades have been [un]consciously elevated above women with darker ones, it is important to rebalance the scale. It behoves us as a society to do this in a way that makes it easy for everyone to live out their true selves, enjoy their best lives and not have to cower or suffer identity crises or mental health issues resulting from things that are out of their control, such as colour and texture of the skin they were born in [or, to an extent, the size of said body].
Are we seeing a new wave of colourism?
In light of previous paragraphs, it is easy to get caught up in a new wave and overdo it at the expense of other existing, established realities. Because darker skin shades are getting the global representation they’d been denied for so long, does not make attention to light skin wrong.
In case you haven’t come across it, there is a strain of extreme feminism asking for more women to poison their spouses' meals. There was also this viral story about a feminist claiming to have aborted a pregnancy once she found out it was a boy because she "couldn't bring another monster into the world." There have been rebuttals to that story but nothing is certain aside the fact that she said what she said.
Yes, achieving equality and a safer world for women may require some radical measures, but surely the ex*****on of baby boys at birth, and the murder of men at their dining tables cannot be the way to go about that, right? This is a much bigger subject with arguably greater and more dire consequences compared to the issues surrounding colourism. But you get the point.
There is a tendency for people to cross the line of reason and good judgement where change is concerned. But as a society, we have to come to a place of better understanding that two truths can coexist. Dark-skinned women can be elevated without casting light skin women down.
Also, every compliment, spotlight or conversation about beautiful light skin women is not an aspersion to the existence of dark-skinned women. It’s not that deep and everything is not done out of malicious agenda.
Las las, everyone just needs to calm down
You can argue that this is a reductive way to view the issue but really, is it? Look around you, there are deeply-melanated queens getting their dues everywhere you look: Genevieve, Ini Edo, Saskay, Bisola, Kate Henshaw, Inidinma Okojie… the list goes on and on – and that is exactly how it should be, particularly in Nigeria where dark-skinned people outnumber the light-skinned ones considerably. Any order which tries to paint dark skin as inferior must be reversed. That’s pretty much what we started seeing globally about 4/5 years ago.
But seeking to do this by the erasure of the light skin folks, or shouting down any mention of them in public discourse cannot be right. If there are no issues pointing out how gorgeous dark skin is, there should be none pointing out the beauty of light skin. After all, all skin types are beautiful and all body types are gorgeous, innit?
