I am seventeen years old, and I only started learning to love my dark skin two years ago. Growing up, I was always the darkest one amongst my friends and family. I remember my mom telling me that when I was born, that the doctor, my aunts, and uncles told her I was the “darkest baby” they had ever seen. They never said these things in a negative way, but as a young child, I didn’t want to be seen as or known as the “darkest baby” ever. Everyone around me was of a lighter complexion to me: my mom, dad, brother, and my friends. Up until now, it’s hard to see the resemblance between my mom and I because I’m about five shades darker than her. I didn’t have a single person living in Southern California that looked like me, which ruined my self-esteem because I didn’t understand why I was the only one who had to be dark-skinned.
When I lived in Nigeria for a bit, I thought I would be able to get a grip on my stance about how I felt about the color of my skin; that didn’t happen. At the time, I believed because I was living in Nigeria and everyone is of different complexions that I would feel comfortable and not out of place. I had people in school when I was in Year Four till Year Seven making fun of my skin tone, saying that i “looked like a gorilla” or telling me to use skin bleaching cream because I was too dark and no one would ever like someone as dark as me. I struggled at this point in my life as I couldn’t understand how people of the same race as me could say such things; at the end of the day, we were both black. After I left Nigeria and moved to England, I once again felt out of place. In my group of friends, I am the darkest one out of the four of us, and it felt like a never-ending cycle of being the one out of place. I remember I went through this phase where all the pictures I would post on Instagram or when I would buy my annual school pictures, it would be in black and white so people wouldn’t be able to tell if I was of a light or dark complexion.
I started to learn how to love my dark skin when I saw a girl I follow on Twitter, @KINGPR1NCESS, start the hashtag #MyBeautifulDarkSkin almost two years ago. I was a bit reluctant about posting photos of myself and jumping on that train, but after seeing the amount of other dark-skinned black girls and guys tweet about similar experiences to mine and them learning how to love their skin tone, I felt as though it was right for me to do so. The movement that she created helped me a lot. I used to want to be loads of shades lighter than I am now, even researching how to get lighter skin because of the bullying I went through. With Princess starting this movement and seeing other individuals proud about their dark skin made me want to love my dark skin, and I’m still learning how.
