Monday, March 7, 2016
Skin Color
In the autobiography that we discussed in class, the man discusses how he lived far from the river when he was a child, so he didn't even know that white people existed. I have experienced this first hand when I went to Haiti last summer. We visited one of the Haitian homes and a fairly young girl started balling crying as soon as she saw us. The family quickly explained that she had never seen white people before and that she was scared. They said not to take it personally, this was her absolute first encounter with white people so she was very shocked at the difference. This is just a crazy concept to me. I can't imagine not knowing of another race for the first few months or years of my life.
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Also relating to the autobiography: The man talks about how beautiful the people are despite their extremely dark skin. In fact he says that their dark skin makes them even more beautiful. This idea led me to think about something I had seen on twitter a few days ago. It was a picture of Rihanna but instead of having black skin she had white skin. The person that posted the picture said something along the lines of "Rihanna looks even prettier white". I personally don't think that skin color determines beauty. I think it is a person's actual body features that determine what people think of as physical beauty. This was just a strange concept to me that the skin color supposedly made a person more or less beautiful. Here is the picture I saw of Rihanna's skin color changed:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcbQHJ_W4AA1b70.jpg
Reading your comment about Rihanna made me think of Michael Jackson. As Michael got older, his skin color changed noticeably from black to white. This more than obvious skin color transition puzzled a lot of people. Michael apparently suffered from two skin conditions (though there were rumors that he bleached his skin)--systemic lupus erythematosus, causing a loss of skin pigmentation, and vitiligo, causing depigmentation of parts of the skin. Michael was interviewed about this and he said, "It is something I cannot help. When people make up stories that I don't want to be who I am, it hurts me. It's a problem for me, I can't control it. But what about all the millions of people who sit in the sun to become darker, to become other than what they are. Nobody says nothing about that." I'm a pale person and I wish I was more tan all the time so when I read his comment about people "sitting in the sun to become other than what they are" opened me to a completely different perspective. To read more about Jackson's treatments and theories about bleaching his skin, read here: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/09/michael-jacksons-skin-turn-white-got-older-2/
Learning about the whole Rihanna skin color change really enraged me. It is sad that the standards of beauty are so set into people's skin tone. I believe that every tone is beautiful and to change someone's I density like that and to say they look better as not who they are is extremely rude and disrespectful. This reminds me of Equiano's writing of how they thought darker skin was more beautiful, and it really makes you realize that beauty is relative and based on perspective.
my grandmother also had a similar experience to seeing a black man for the first time when she was 6. It was the end of WWII and the american soldiers had arrived in Belgium to give some aide to any survivors. they made it to my grandmothers house she said when they opened the door to the men she said she was instantly scared because she has never seen a black man and from having to go through the war and was pretty young and probably didn't have a good understanding to why people were bombing her county, she could have thought that this man was here to hurt her. she soon learned of course that he was there to help, but that event has been engraved in her mind, Like one of you were saying it is pretty crazy to think that some people have never witnessed other races before.
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