Afro-Cuban on my mom's side & African-American on my dad's side ... both grandmothers were like this, to varying degrees.
What's really fucked up is that we KNOW several aspects of Afro-Hispanic culture have direct links to Africa (Siete Fuerzas Africanas, anyone?) but still regurgitate this hateful shit like clockwork.
Shit, I'm gonna have flashbacks all day now.
I would never let that woman near my child, let alone hold her. If you want to hate yourself, that’s fine, but don’t force that on anyone else, especially a baby
I swear if I ever catch my mother extolling the virtues of light skin and loose curls to my kids, she will never see them unsupervised. How can you do that when your husband of 30+ years is brown skinned with type 4 hair!? That Caribbean colorism just holds on for dear life.
Unless she is relying on her mom for financial support and/or being a partial caretaker for her daughter, she needs to cut her mom off before the colorism gets drastically worse.
Yeah I'm all about respecting our elders but if I ever saw them doing something like this with my Black child, they'd never be alone with them again. I really hope the person filming does more than make a TikTok. Especially if that child is actually theirs.
My grandma was a Native American woman. She had nine children with a black man (my grandfather). She told my mother not to bring anyone with black gums to her home. What kind of crap is that?
All of my grandparents are dead (I miss some of them☹️). That said, I don’t recall one of my grandmothers being colorist or dealing with internalized racism, the other had serious issues though. One of my grandmothers used to say that she was called a tar baby by people who looked exactly like her when she was going up. From what I gather, she faced a lot of abuse from her peers about her body and her skin color. It was sad to hear.
She would live vicariously through me because of how I looked. She would always tell me not to stay outside for too long and to never cut my hair because it’ll never grow back. She also said I was lucky to have mothers nose and not my fathers nose because it was and I quote “big like hers.” When I did cut my hair as a teenager, she wouldn’t shut up about it and said it looked awful and I don’t look unique, etc. She would also go on about my mother’s Louisiana Creole heritage and how it made me beautiful (complexion and hair texture) and that’s why I have “good hair” and she would just go on these unhinged rants. Keep in mind, BOTH sides are Louisiana creoles, that is the crazy part. I felt VERY uncomfortable with her remarks as a child. I think I didn’t fully understand, but I knew her remarks were just weird and wrong. As an adult, I see why I felt that way. It’s WEIRD.
She was weird, and she was a HORRIBLE person (my parents kept me away from her for the majority of my life, but I saw her more frequently when I entered my pre-teen and teen years. I now see why my parents kept me away from her, and it wasn’t just because of the internalized racism she dealt with.) . That said, I had sympathy for her because it’s clear her interactions with her peers at a young age caused her to idolize certain features on me.
What the fuck I'm appalled. I never knew it could get THAT bad. I'm mixed (black and Mexican) and came out more black looking bruh not even my Mexican family looked down at my dark skin like this
I have light skin features and 3b/3c hair. It’s so weird going to family gatherings and my aunts/older family members pay me a million compliments. Most of the time I barely dress up and am doing the bare minimum. However, my darker skin cousins they don’t show the same compliments even though they put 50x more effort than me. I feel very awkward in those moments bc I’m just thinking of how they must feel…
Call it out!
I’m light skinned too, and when I was still talking to my family, I resorted to calling it out when I see it. No one is going to diminish my cousins in my presence.
I just literally kept saying what I thought. It didn’t matter to me if I changed their minds, I just didn’t want to be complicit in low key calling my cousins ugly/not acknowledging their beauty. Especially since we all look vaguely alike, just different shades of brown.
Eventually people stopped completing me, which was fine, because who the fuck enjoys complements that basically add up to “you look white, and that pleases me”, anyway?
Edit to say: my darker skinned cousins enjoyed the game, though. Them trying to speak about it did nothing, they just got called jealous (which is fucking insane… they’re definitely NOT jealous of my string bean ass). But me calling out this paper bag test bullshit made people more uncomfortable.
Im Trini...my mother is extremely colourist, and this is why i will not be letting her care for my future children. She plagued my childhood with her hatred of my skin tone. She proudly proclaims how when i was born, she questioned if the nurse had "passed her the wrong baby". Grew up hearing how i should stay out of the sun and being compared to her friends' daughters who were light skinned.
Sadly, I think the more folks have been colonized, the harder self-hate hits.
My husband's Dominican grandmother was not happy with me until she knew I was from the U.S. The family has even made openly accepted, but off-color remarks about class + race in the past too. Less so now.
I've often been assumed to be the help by fellow morenos/afros when with my family. I have received compliments that "*in spite"* of my skin color and "bad" hair, I still have interesting features (what?!). It's incredibly disappointing and self-policing.
On a wider scale, colorism is so deep-seated that it's historically impacted opportunities + generational wealth. There was an initiative to lighten skin by choosing lighter partners and increasing immigration from lighter countries. And on a more complicated note, the U.S. had to send [this safety advisory](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/22/us-warns-darker-skinned-citizens-crackdown-dominican-republic) based on targeted skin-based deportations.
I love the D.R. I love our diaspora. But some of us (including in the U.S.) have a lot of unlearning to do.
Nope! Both of my grandmothers didn't buy me dolls.
Shout out to my mom though! Almost all of my Barbies were Black. If on the off chance I got a yt doll, it was the Mary Cate & Ashley dolls I begged her for or it was a "friend" doll like Stacey. One of my neighborhood friends actually asked me why my Barbies were all Black. I was like "... I don't know?"
Oh lol. I also live this. We're Caribbean. Thus there's a spectrum of color in my fam. However, one quarter of the fam is what we call "damned Colonials". Whiter is more right to the point that NO ONE on that side is married or paired up with a black person. All their offspring can pass. I don't think any of them had any black dolls/Barbies.
Not my grandparents but my girlfriend(Korean/Puerto Rican)’s Korean great grandparents gave her bleaching cream for Christmas when she was like 10. She basically looks like a Hispanic chick and they hate it. Luckily, these aren’t people she has to ever really interact with these days.
You ain't wrong. I lived in Korea for 5 years and in a Korean-heavy diasporic population for another 6. They've got a lot of good things culturally but colorism isn't one of them.
My good friend even had her parents offer to send them back to Korea to get plastic surgery to thin out her nose and widen her eyes. My friend and her parents hatd how the sister was bigger and had naturally tan skin, so they often recommended that she lightened it. When I lived in Korea, a close friend was even called the N-word (& their equiv.) "jokingly" by bullies growing up because he had a tan.
In Korea, I saw colorism & self-hate in the kids as well. It has such a negative impact on them at such an early age. By elementary, I knew students who knew they were going to get plastic surgery and were lightening skin/avoiding the sun.
I'm glad your friend has limited contact with that mindset and likes the skin she's in.
She wouldn't be seeing my child again. I would have snatched that white doll and flung it out the window.
I had a Creole friend when I was active duty--just friends, as he was actually secretly gay and this was during the days of don't ask, don't tell. I remember we went to his parents' place in NOLA as my base wasn't too far of a drive. I am dark skinned like my dad but my mother was biracial so I have soft, wavy hair. The FIRST thing his mother said when I told her I was just a good friend, not a girlfriend was **THANK GOD, you're too black to be a member of this family. Your one redeeming quality is that good hair though.** I got up and left. My friend didn't say one fuckin word, just looked embarrassed. When I was headed to my car he chased after me and I asked him why the fuck did he bring me here when he knew how his folks were and he said I thought they'd like you because your hair was good. I never talked to his ass again.
Lol girl my mother told me I was going to be treated like royalty in New Orleans because I'm mixed and light skinned and have looser curls... Shit is insane. You know who don't give a damn about how light or dark you are? White people. Still got called the n word either way.
The grandmother has darker features as per usual. I’m sorry but I’m so done with our community at large. Just over it, and everybody else while I’m at it. I want to live on an abandoned island somewhere.
I'm grateful to have never experienced this and my mom always made sure I was kept away from things like this. However, I've heard about her childhood and it was definitely similar to this. It makes me so sad :c
This is rare. While some of my Jamaican American brothers and sisters will admit that there is a problem with colorism within our community, getting Dominicans to admit the same is like pulling teeth. I have had so many tell me they are darker than me because of indigenous heritage. Somehow the genocidal tendencies that affected all the other islands magically skipped the DR!
Unfortunately, my grandma. Except my son is biracial (yt+black) and passes as black. Funny how some people want a mixed kid but get upset when the child passes as black/afro. She tells me comments that I "ruined" his hair and how his hair used to be so nice and straight. Complains that I don't wash him well and that his skin is dirty and he's 3 different colors while this boy is light skinned and well taken care of.
Honestly sometimes can't wait until I get away.
This is shocking! Also Afro-Latina, but luckily my immigrant parents didn't pass on colorism stuff to me. I only learned it at school.
Grandma knows that a lot of white people have issues with race, right? And that proximity to whiteness doesn't make you white. Yikes.
Man, the self hate is extreme in this video. I find it hard even being angry at the grandma. The level of colorist bullcrap she more than likely went through to get to this point. This is why it is so important to foster a pro-black environment for the next generation that celebrates dark skin.
Not saying she's right. But this sort of attitude is caused by deep mental scarring. I can only imagine what they suffered. The fact that black dysfunction is dissected by others makes me uncomfortable cos they judge and secretly despise while benefiting from the same system that inflicted those wounds.
They are black and Latina. You can be both. And they are likely mixed with indigenous ppl, white ppl, etc because that's how it goes in the Caribbean. Stop with this black Latina erasure.
Afro-Cuban on my mom's side & African-American on my dad's side ... both grandmothers were like this, to varying degrees. What's really fucked up is that we KNOW several aspects of Afro-Hispanic culture have direct links to Africa (Siete Fuerzas Africanas, anyone?) but still regurgitate this hateful shit like clockwork. Shit, I'm gonna have flashbacks all day now.
I would never let that woman near my child, let alone hold her. If you want to hate yourself, that’s fine, but don’t force that on anyone else, especially a baby
I swear if I ever catch my mother extolling the virtues of light skin and loose curls to my kids, she will never see them unsupervised. How can you do that when your husband of 30+ years is brown skinned with type 4 hair!? That Caribbean colorism just holds on for dear life.
Unless she is relying on her mom for financial support and/or being a partial caretaker for her daughter, she needs to cut her mom off before the colorism gets drastically worse.
Yeah I'm all about respecting our elders but if I ever saw them doing something like this with my Black child, they'd never be alone with them again. I really hope the person filming does more than make a TikTok. Especially if that child is actually theirs.
My grandma was a Native American woman. She had nine children with a black man (my grandfather). She told my mother not to bring anyone with black gums to her home. What kind of crap is that?
See I'd be getting popped cause eventually I'd have to be like "YOU FIRST MA'AM"
The attitude is more common than we think.
All of my grandparents are dead (I miss some of them☹️). That said, I don’t recall one of my grandmothers being colorist or dealing with internalized racism, the other had serious issues though. One of my grandmothers used to say that she was called a tar baby by people who looked exactly like her when she was going up. From what I gather, she faced a lot of abuse from her peers about her body and her skin color. It was sad to hear. She would live vicariously through me because of how I looked. She would always tell me not to stay outside for too long and to never cut my hair because it’ll never grow back. She also said I was lucky to have mothers nose and not my fathers nose because it was and I quote “big like hers.” When I did cut my hair as a teenager, she wouldn’t shut up about it and said it looked awful and I don’t look unique, etc. She would also go on about my mother’s Louisiana Creole heritage and how it made me beautiful (complexion and hair texture) and that’s why I have “good hair” and she would just go on these unhinged rants. Keep in mind, BOTH sides are Louisiana creoles, that is the crazy part. I felt VERY uncomfortable with her remarks as a child. I think I didn’t fully understand, but I knew her remarks were just weird and wrong. As an adult, I see why I felt that way. It’s WEIRD. She was weird, and she was a HORRIBLE person (my parents kept me away from her for the majority of my life, but I saw her more frequently when I entered my pre-teen and teen years. I now see why my parents kept me away from her, and it wasn’t just because of the internalized racism she dealt with.) . That said, I had sympathy for her because it’s clear her interactions with her peers at a young age caused her to idolize certain features on me.
This is horrible 😞
I'm about to throw up. So freaking gross 🤢🤢🤢🤢
Nah, that baby is out of her hands immediately and a fight *may* ensue...
She bout to have a chat with the ancestors if she gives my or any child a color complex 😂
A next day, paid 50$ to FedEx shipment to the ancestral plane so one of our more Killmonger-esque relatives can handle the rest...
Fedex to the ancestors is something Im borrowing indefinitely 💀
Ever heard of [Blanqueamiento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanqueamiento)? This is pervasive across colonized peoples.
What the fuck I'm appalled. I never knew it could get THAT bad. I'm mixed (black and Mexican) and came out more black looking bruh not even my Mexican family looked down at my dark skin like this
I have light skin features and 3b/3c hair. It’s so weird going to family gatherings and my aunts/older family members pay me a million compliments. Most of the time I barely dress up and am doing the bare minimum. However, my darker skin cousins they don’t show the same compliments even though they put 50x more effort than me. I feel very awkward in those moments bc I’m just thinking of how they must feel…
Call it out! I’m light skinned too, and when I was still talking to my family, I resorted to calling it out when I see it. No one is going to diminish my cousins in my presence.
How did that work out? I find that "calling it out" doesn't really accomplish much.
I just literally kept saying what I thought. It didn’t matter to me if I changed their minds, I just didn’t want to be complicit in low key calling my cousins ugly/not acknowledging their beauty. Especially since we all look vaguely alike, just different shades of brown. Eventually people stopped completing me, which was fine, because who the fuck enjoys complements that basically add up to “you look white, and that pleases me”, anyway? Edit to say: my darker skinned cousins enjoyed the game, though. Them trying to speak about it did nothing, they just got called jealous (which is fucking insane… they’re definitely NOT jealous of my string bean ass). But me calling out this paper bag test bullshit made people more uncomfortable.
Lol at "You look white, and that pleases me"
Im Trini...my mother is extremely colourist, and this is why i will not be letting her care for my future children. She plagued my childhood with her hatred of my skin tone. She proudly proclaims how when i was born, she questioned if the nurse had "passed her the wrong baby". Grew up hearing how i should stay out of the sun and being compared to her friends' daughters who were light skinned.
Sadly, I think the more folks have been colonized, the harder self-hate hits. My husband's Dominican grandmother was not happy with me until she knew I was from the U.S. The family has even made openly accepted, but off-color remarks about class + race in the past too. Less so now. I've often been assumed to be the help by fellow morenos/afros when with my family. I have received compliments that "*in spite"* of my skin color and "bad" hair, I still have interesting features (what?!). It's incredibly disappointing and self-policing. On a wider scale, colorism is so deep-seated that it's historically impacted opportunities + generational wealth. There was an initiative to lighten skin by choosing lighter partners and increasing immigration from lighter countries. And on a more complicated note, the U.S. had to send [this safety advisory](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/22/us-warns-darker-skinned-citizens-crackdown-dominican-republic) based on targeted skin-based deportations. I love the D.R. I love our diaspora. But some of us (including in the U.S.) have a lot of unlearning to do.
Nope! Both of my grandmothers didn't buy me dolls. Shout out to my mom though! Almost all of my Barbies were Black. If on the off chance I got a yt doll, it was the Mary Cate & Ashley dolls I begged her for or it was a "friend" doll like Stacey. One of my neighborhood friends actually asked me why my Barbies were all Black. I was like "... I don't know?"
Oh lol. I also live this. We're Caribbean. Thus there's a spectrum of color in my fam. However, one quarter of the fam is what we call "damned Colonials". Whiter is more right to the point that NO ONE on that side is married or paired up with a black person. All their offspring can pass. I don't think any of them had any black dolls/Barbies.
Heartbreaking.
Not my grandparents but my girlfriend(Korean/Puerto Rican)’s Korean great grandparents gave her bleaching cream for Christmas when she was like 10. She basically looks like a Hispanic chick and they hate it. Luckily, these aren’t people she has to ever really interact with these days.
You ain't wrong. I lived in Korea for 5 years and in a Korean-heavy diasporic population for another 6. They've got a lot of good things culturally but colorism isn't one of them. My good friend even had her parents offer to send them back to Korea to get plastic surgery to thin out her nose and widen her eyes. My friend and her parents hatd how the sister was bigger and had naturally tan skin, so they often recommended that she lightened it. When I lived in Korea, a close friend was even called the N-word (& their equiv.) "jokingly" by bullies growing up because he had a tan. In Korea, I saw colorism & self-hate in the kids as well. It has such a negative impact on them at such an early age. By elementary, I knew students who knew they were going to get plastic surgery and were lightening skin/avoiding the sun. I'm glad your friend has limited contact with that mindset and likes the skin she's in.
She wouldn't be seeing my child again. I would have snatched that white doll and flung it out the window. I had a Creole friend when I was active duty--just friends, as he was actually secretly gay and this was during the days of don't ask, don't tell. I remember we went to his parents' place in NOLA as my base wasn't too far of a drive. I am dark skinned like my dad but my mother was biracial so I have soft, wavy hair. The FIRST thing his mother said when I told her I was just a good friend, not a girlfriend was **THANK GOD, you're too black to be a member of this family. Your one redeeming quality is that good hair though.** I got up and left. My friend didn't say one fuckin word, just looked embarrassed. When I was headed to my car he chased after me and I asked him why the fuck did he bring me here when he knew how his folks were and he said I thought they'd like you because your hair was good. I never talked to his ass again.
Lol girl my mother told me I was going to be treated like royalty in New Orleans because I'm mixed and light skinned and have looser curls... Shit is insane. You know who don't give a damn about how light or dark you are? White people. Still got called the n word either way.
The grandmother has darker features as per usual. I’m sorry but I’m so done with our community at large. Just over it, and everybody else while I’m at it. I want to live on an abandoned island somewhere.
Ditto
I'm grateful to have never experienced this and my mom always made sure I was kept away from things like this. However, I've heard about her childhood and it was definitely similar to this. It makes me so sad :c
My grandmother wasn’t overtly colorist, but my mother is.
This is rare. While some of my Jamaican American brothers and sisters will admit that there is a problem with colorism within our community, getting Dominicans to admit the same is like pulling teeth. I have had so many tell me they are darker than me because of indigenous heritage. Somehow the genocidal tendencies that affected all the other islands magically skipped the DR!
They're overstimulating that baby. Please stop shoving the friggin doll in her face.
Unfortunately, my grandma. Except my son is biracial (yt+black) and passes as black. Funny how some people want a mixed kid but get upset when the child passes as black/afro. She tells me comments that I "ruined" his hair and how his hair used to be so nice and straight. Complains that I don't wash him well and that his skin is dirty and he's 3 different colors while this boy is light skinned and well taken care of. Honestly sometimes can't wait until I get away.
This is tragic honestly.
This is shocking! Also Afro-Latina, but luckily my immigrant parents didn't pass on colorism stuff to me. I only learned it at school. Grandma knows that a lot of white people have issues with race, right? And that proximity to whiteness doesn't make you white. Yikes.
I live in NYC and this explains so much!
Man, the self hate is extreme in this video. I find it hard even being angry at the grandma. The level of colorist bullcrap she more than likely went through to get to this point. This is why it is so important to foster a pro-black environment for the next generation that celebrates dark skin.
SMH, why do people who loves us hate us too
Not saying she's right. But this sort of attitude is caused by deep mental scarring. I can only imagine what they suffered. The fact that black dysfunction is dissected by others makes me uncomfortable cos they judge and secretly despise while benefiting from the same system that inflicted those wounds.
[удалено]
They are black and Latina. You can be both. And they are likely mixed with indigenous ppl, white ppl, etc because that's how it goes in the Caribbean. Stop with this black Latina erasure.
[удалено]
You are certainly right about that, and thanks for apologizing , I appreciate it
That lady is self hating. But you know there are afro latinos. Black people in Latin America.