so I have been off for a while and its because I have been dealing with something I thought I had concurred it but it seems I was wrong. You hear a lot of people say that whenever you are going through something the best way to deal with it is to talk to someone, but what if you have no one to talk to, what do you do? so finally today decided to open up because this is the only place I can express myself openly and today am gonna share with you what I have been going through since my childhood.
We have all heard of many types of discrimination but there is one type of discrimination that has been ignored since time immemorial,shadeism. Shadeism or colorism is discrimination based on skin tone, which exists amongst members of the same community, creating a ranking of a person’s worth based on shade. its more common in Asian and western countries but one place people have ignored is Africa,in recent years we have seen studies showing the number of bleaching cases among African women going up. This is because there was a fantasy that was created expressing white women as beautiful making the African woman hate herself.
But not only women have experienced this, even the African man has gone through this many times than imagined but they do not speak out. I have been a victim of this almost all my life. And when I talk about all my life I mean from my toddler days through to my college days. Funny thing is that most people who shade you in Africa are not even light-skinned, they are just fairly lighter than you. To my story now, it all started with my relatives from my dad’s side shaming me because I was the son of a woman they did not want married to their son. This brought a lot of fights prompting my dad to relocate us to Nakuru, As it’s very obvious relocating with kids means you have to find a new school for them so my parents had to find one for me. luckily for my parents it wasn’t hard finding a school because where my dad worked there was a school where most of the employees’ kids went.
At first it all started as a joke but it became serious when one day I was picked up by the school bus and upon sitting down everyone who was sitting close to me moved to the next available seat that was not close to me. It went on even in the classroom, no one wanted to be my deskmate. This was happening one month after I joined the school. I could not play, talk, eat, or do anything in peace. The teachers noticed what was going on but interestingly they did nothing. I resulted in reading and watching movies as ways of keeping myself occupied which paid off in a way because I passed all my exams. But there was no joy because only my parents were happy with it, I had no friends. I started missing school because I never felt comfortable being in school. And when my parents found out they gave me a beating and didn’t ask why I did that, I continued missing school for a while until they opted to change school. One thing is that no matter how many schools I went to it never stopped until I joined highschool when it toned down a bit and by then I had opened up to to my parents and they were helping me deal with it and at the same time they were sorry they hadn’t caught it early. I could talk to girls, even in high school where everyone else had a girlfriend and up to now I have a problem doing that. many people laugh at me when they here I have never had a girlfriend.
shadeism made me hate myself, at one point I even thought my parents hated me and packed my clothes ready to go and live in the streets. It made me develop lies just to fit in, which eventually never worked, made me never trust people, made me see myself as an outcast and unwanted, and every day I deal with it, up to now it’s hard to make friends because every time I look at people I see the bad in them and not the good when someone says something to me I overthink it thinking it was directed to me because of my color. Many people are going through this every day and the problem is that many don’t know how to deal with it, I have to know idea how to but there is one thing my mother told me, and that is always picture yourself on the moon even when people picture you on earth.
It’s never fun nor is it good to make fun of someone may it be based on color, body shape or anything, when you feel like shaming someone try and fit in their shoes and you will know how it feels to have the whole world against you simply because of how you look. stop shadeism
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