Thank you to Stylish Thought for her post on a fundraising campaign for a very important film which deals with the topic of skin colour within the Black community, especially the way it affects women and their self-image. Consider Me Lovely wrote a beautiful and personal post on being a dark-skinned African-American girl which you may have already read here (cos I’m kind of obsessed with it) and I’m so glad to have discovered this documentary called Dark Girls which is set to be released in the Fall. In the eye-opening trailer we hear dark-skinned women speaking in a candid way about the hurt they’ve experienced by being excluded from the paradigm of beauty:

“I can remember being in the bathtub and asking my mom to put bleach in the water…so I could escape the feelings I had of not being as beautiful…”

“She’s pretty for a dark-skinned girl…”

“It was so damaging. It made us feel we weren’t wanted, that we were less than.”

“Can you imagine if she had any lightness in her skin? She’d be gorgeous.”

“Whites would tell me ‘you have such beautiful skin’…why do they think I’m beautiful and my own people don’t see any beauty in me at all?”

It’s hard to watch women talk about their personal pain especially when it starts in childhood and is sometimes inflicted by their own parents, and it’s a topic about which many white people are completely oblivious. Bias based on skin tone needs to be discussed openly and widely for attitudes to change and the filmmakers need our help to give this documentary the attention it deserves. British fashion photographer Nick Knight says:

“It is my belief that our society must be inclusive and by denying people the right to be seen as beautiful you cause deep cultural resentment, alienation and division.”

It’s an issue that affects us all. I already made a donation and I hope you will consider doing the same. Here’s the link:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Dark-Girls-Movie/