https://www.facebook.com/sangeetha.thanapal/posts/10155894489209207
Sangeetha Thanapal
November 3 at 6:57pm ·
Just thinking about the conversation friends and I were having yesterday about colourism.
Light-skin/white passing privilege is real. It has material benefits-in employment, in dating, in healthcare, in education, and mostly in representation. Are we just going to sit around and pretend as if it is just coincidence that it is always the lightest skinned amongst us that gets to represent us and has the most visibility? Maybe they just happen to be the most talented amongst us. How convenient.
Acknowledging this is NOT a denial of the oppression of millions of POC who are erased. It is not a denial of any other oppression either, cos you know, intersectionality exists.
It just means we have different experiences because we are read differently.
There is such a failure of intersectionality when two narratives cannot exist at the same time. Why can't they? They should-because we are a people who contain multitudes and because conversations around oppression and power need to be nuanced and complicated.
My dark skin is a huge part of me, and a huge reason why I am oppressed. To deny this is to deny my lived experience, and who are you to dare do this? I'm so happy that you've lived a nice, light-skinned life where you don't understand what it means to have dark skin, but that is not a luxury I have had.
Don't ever tell me you are a better witness to my experience than I am.
Keep your fucking revolution. It is a false consciousness that seeks to weaponize your identity to deny my oppression. A revolution in which proximity to whiteness is not addressed, in which the daily little humiliations heaped upon dark-skinned people of every race and culture is denied, is not one I am interested in.
Fuck any revolution that addresses the colour of my skin in whispers.
Sangeetha Thanapal
November 3 at 6:57pm ·
Just thinking about the conversation friends and I were having yesterday about colourism.
Light-skin/white passing privilege is real. It has material benefits-in employment, in dating, in healthcare, in education, and mostly in representation. Are we just going to sit around and pretend as if it is just coincidence that it is always the lightest skinned amongst us that gets to represent us and has the most visibility? Maybe they just happen to be the most talented amongst us. How convenient.
Acknowledging this is NOT a denial of the oppression of millions of POC who are erased. It is not a denial of any other oppression either, cos you know, intersectionality exists.
It just means we have different experiences because we are read differently.
There is such a failure of intersectionality when two narratives cannot exist at the same time. Why can't they? They should-because we are a people who contain multitudes and because conversations around oppression and power need to be nuanced and complicated.
My dark skin is a huge part of me, and a huge reason why I am oppressed. To deny this is to deny my lived experience, and who are you to dare do this? I'm so happy that you've lived a nice, light-skinned life where you don't understand what it means to have dark skin, but that is not a luxury I have had.
Don't ever tell me you are a better witness to my experience than I am.
Keep your fucking revolution. It is a false consciousness that seeks to weaponize your identity to deny my oppression. A revolution in which proximity to whiteness is not addressed, in which the daily little humiliations heaped upon dark-skinned people of every race and culture is denied, is not one I am interested in.
Fuck any revolution that addresses the colour of my skin in whispers.
