By They told me I was too dark.
Too Black to be beautiful.
Too bold for softness.
Too much melanin for the spotlight, but just enough to be made invisible.
I was a child when I learned that Black had shades of acceptance.
That light skin was praised, admired, protected.
And dark skin—mine—was something to survive in.
To cover. To bleach. To apologize for.
And it didn’t come from strangers.
It came from inside our own community.
Colorism.
It wears our faces.
It lives in our aunties’ whispers.
In the jokes passed down like family recipes.
In the casting calls.
In the beauty aisle.
In the way love is offered to one shade and withheld from another.
We didn’t invent this.
But we’ve inherited it.
Colonialism taught it. Enslavement enforced it.
Proximity to whiteness became the prize, and we’ve been chasing it for generations—at the cost
of each other.
And I’ve had enough.
Because I am a dark-skinned Black woman.
Not “pretty for a dark-skinned girl.”
Not “strong because I have to be.”
Just beautiful.
Just worthy.
Just me.
We can’t heal what we won’t name.
And colorism is still breaking us.
It’s in the little girl whose skin is rich like mahogany but who only sees light-skinned influencers
on her feed.
It’s in the dark-skinned boy told he’s handsome if he keeps his features soft and smile
clean—but never dark girls.
It’s in the way we pair beauty with brightness, and pain with pigmentation.
But let me be clear:
This skin I wear? It is not a burden. It is a crown.
It holds the sun.
It sings our history.
It tells the story of kingdoms and survival and unshakeable presence.
I come from women who wore their skin like armor and like art.
Women who were kissed by the continent, rooted in rhythm, draped in earth tones and legacy.
Their love lives in my hue.
And every time I say I love myself, I am loving them too.
So how do we begin to break the cycle?
We stop praising lightness like it’s salvation.
We stop mocking dark girls for being loud, or calling them masculine, or overlooking their
softness.
We stop letting media tell us what “universal beauty” means when it only shows one kind of
Black.
We stop playing into the lie that whiteness is the bar and every shade further away is worth less.
We start at home.
Affirm the dark-skinned girls before they learn to hate their reflection.
Tell the dark boys they are more than strong—they are allowed to be soft too.
Uplift our sisters without comparison. Without conditions.
And most importantly—we turn that mirror on ourselves and do the hard work of unlearning.
I had to peel back the lies.
Had to take the shame off my shoulders and give it back to the system that created it.
I had to write love notes to my skin.
I had to sit in the sun and say, “You belong to me, and I belong to you.”
Colorism may be the wound, but self-love is the healing.
So here’s my reminder for every dark-skinned Black woman reading this:
You are not too much.
You are not too dark.
You are not invisible.
You are a masterpiece painted in resilience, kissed by creation itself.
Your skin is poetry.
Your shade is not a sentence—it’s a story.
And baby, it’s time you started writing yourself as the main character.
�� Ways to Cultivate Self-Love in a Colorist World
● Unfollow the harm. Clean your feed. Fill it with dark-skinned creators, models, writers,
and women who look like you and love it.
● Affirm out loud. Every day. Say it in the mirror. Say it tired. Say it shaky. But say it: “I
love my skin. I am beautiful. I belong.”
● Talk to your people. Have hard conversations with your family and friends. Gently
challenge the jokes, the comments, the ignorance.
● Celebrate your culture. Wear the colors. Eat the food. Learn your lineage. Your roots run
deeper than this system wants you to know.
● Choose softness. You don’t have to be hard all the time. You deserve rest, tenderness,
and gentleness—especially from yourself.
We are not each other’s competition.
We are not divided by shade—we are connected by soul.
And when we heal colorism, we don’t just free ourselves—
We free the next generation.
With melanin-rich love,
Shayla
