It has been said by the experts in psychology that we cannot change what we do not acknowledge and my experience is that most persons would rather sweep those issues under the rug and keep moving forward. The problem with that is many of the bad feelings created by colourism is a pulsating ball of emotions that lie dormant just below the surface until such time when even simple provocations cause an eruption that is seriously out of proportion with the circumstance.
I was always aware that some dark-skinned persons are so affected by colourism that they believe that some people are more fortunate than they are only because they are lighter coloured. I always felt that that observation was solely mine until I watched an Oprah event on OWN with Iyanla Vanzant when some dark skinned women were visibly surprised that their light-skinned contemporaries also hurt because of how they were treated solely because of their colour.
I have had many experiences where I was bullied and called names for several reasons including the colour of my skin.
One very significant experience happened while in Primary School, Grade Two to be exact – and primary school was mostly bad.
The entire class would go out for games which was a weekly exercise. There was one ring game called the Farmer in the Dell where the farmer would take a wife, the wife takes a child all the way down to the rat picking a cheese. And who was the cheese?
Yours truly.
I was the cheese.
At the time I was so happy to be picked because I was accustomed to being treated badly or ignored at home, so when I started remembering - because for many years most of my childhood memories were elusive or totally forgotten - I was shocked at the obvious bigotry being played out especially bearing in mind that the teacher would have also been involved since it was during class time, not recess.
I particularly remember how boisterous everyone was when they reached the part where the cheese stood alone. That threw me for a loop because I realized then that I was more alone than I ever thought. It might have happened a long time ago but the memory came back as fresh as if it were yesterday. I was in the moment.
Over the years I have been in the presence of dark-skinned persons who speak bitterly of the time when they would not have been able to work in the banks and other large companies unless it was as the janitor or some other menial occupation and believe me I used to feel like I was the cause of that situation. Other times some would speak with glee of their higher education (and rightly so since they worked their tails off for such an achievement) and how nobody can stop them. Again, it seemed like they threw out a challenge to me to just try.
It is very easy for us to be carried away on waves of emotions and it would be a good thing to stop and assess the situation, the emotions and whether or not it has the validity to prompt us to hop onto that particular bandwagon.
Fast forward to a few years later in high school; I was probably about fifteen years old. My class mate, who was very dark-skinned, and I were walking home and she had a habit of ridiculing persons who had a distinct redness to their complexion and if they had freckles. This was her habit towards persons who did not have an acceptable shade of fairness. Oh yes in the black community some brown are not as equal as others especially for the albinos, and she always laughed at them.
I was not a fifteen year old with raging hormones so I was not boy crazy by any means. My survival from day to day was enough of a problem – boyfriends were not on my agenda (I doubt I had an agenda). There was this guy in my class who would hit me and run and I would run him down and hit him back. She saw romance in the situation, I saw annoyance. (Now I can call it bully-ism).
One day she had been ridiculing a woman, who was particularly ruddy-complexioned (that is as ruddy as a black person could be), with freckles which, of course, I did not find to be funny so she moved on to teasing me about the boy. I was angry so I attacked the fact that he was “black and ugly” and I feel real small writing this but I am all about truth in my writings.
When I was growing up in the sixties and seventies black people were oftentimes referred to as black and ugly and if it makes anyone feel better I was also referred to as red and ugly.
Anyway, I am realizing only recently that she had been offended to the point of malice which is an interesting observation because I now realize that they always remember your affront while it took me decades to figure out why she stopped talking to me – she and whoever she got to jump on that bandwagon.
I would like to think that we have matured beyond the hurting of childhood and the legacy of slavery by which we are all victimized and still we continue to survive tenuously. And so now I understand why things said are taken out of context and things said with no bigoted intent can be taken as such - the underlying unresolved resentments.
Jamaicans (maybe people as a whole but I only know Jamaicans) talk with a lot of double entendre which gives rise to misunderstandings. Perhaps it is time we learn to have real conversations and understand what is being said before we drum up a following to persecute others needlessly.
I will continue to take people based off the conversations I have had with them and not a third party’s interpretation. We usually tell the story to make our side look good but there are three sides to a story – my side, your side and the facts. Who I was at fifteen is not who I was fifteen years ago and certainly not who I am today. You bet I am going to be different fifteen years from now.