The Elusive Pursuit of Dark Beauty

“I can remember being in the bathtub asking my mom to put bleach in the water so that my skin would be lighter and so that I could escape the feelings I had about not being as beautiful, as acceptable, as lovable.” “She’s pretty for a dark-skinned girl … What is that supposed to mean?”…

Raising Interracially Adopted Black Babies – Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I argued that interracially adopted black babies ought to be taught a vernacular (African) language at first language proficiency to give them the option of communing with other black people who share their experiences of being black in a (sadly, still) highly racialised world. In this part, I expand…

Black hair in and from India

You may not have seen Chris Rock’s movie, “Good Hair”, but I’m convinced that much of India has. What leads me to believe this (in spite of the country’s proud preference for Bollywood over Hollywood) is the number of conversations that I had during our three week trip this Dec/Jan that went something like this:…