Recently, I have been seeing a lot of controversy around Beyoncé’s Black Is King and how a light-skinned person is at the forefront of a piece centered on Africa/(heritage) blackness, and how this further perpetuates the problem of colorism and how it has been entirely absorbed by society and selectively talked about.

And to me, it shows how society is entirely selective when coming to certain matters and their effects on those affected by it, this being one of them. Cancel Culture is a double-edged sword, I think we can all agree on that, and “cancelling” Beyonce would not further educate people on the effects of colorism but only enrage them and put them against each other because of the differences in their opinions, but what really ticked me off was how a WHITE PERSON said disqualifying Beyonce because of the shade of her skin would be disastrous for black people, seeing she is the most popular African American alive.

Am I the only one recognizing how white people keep on enforcing racially -influenced structures and conditions on us because of what has been condoned by television, schools and every source of informational communication garnered for use by society to convey these messages?

Unfortunately, this has been a FOREVER problem that was disregarded because not every black person was affected by it but not realizing that by not noticing and calling out injustices of our own people in our community while tackling the eternal ongoing pandemic of racism and discrimination, we were allowing white people to have an upper hand and furthermore extending their influence on our community, and giving their crooked ideations space in our lives, which WE DO NOT NEED. This also gives off the impression that we do agree with this construct that lighter-skinned people are more deserving than darker-skinned people solely because we’re acting on it and we’re condoning things influenced by this construct, and I AM HONESTLY NOT HERE FOR IT.

So let’s make it a habit of not disregarding issues and problems encountered by our own people while trying to fight one big one that includes all of us.

Like I said in my previous posts, subdued white cultural assimilation has disintegrated the nature of black people to see the greatness in themselves without finding a flaw in it, they have taught us that it is wrong to be great on our own, it is wrong to see the beauty in our authentic essence and overall, that is wrong to be BLACK, and not only because they think we need them to survive, they are just afraid that we would survive better without them and quite frankly, I don’t give a single f*ck what they are afraid of.

And back to the issue about Beyoncé, I feel we are engaging it in the wrong manner. While entirely acknowledging the debilitating effects of this construct, we must reform our mindsets to look at things the way they are. Some conversations ALWAYS HAVE TO BE HAD and just because it’s Beyoncé doesn’t make it any less of issues and it should just be discarded. Colorism is a problem and Hollywood has been encouraging it since the beginning of time. 

IT IS A PROBLEM.

And this doesn’t also happen only in issues of the public or issues that only concern celebrities, there are a lot of hotspots for colorism. Like for instance, workplaces and schools (e.g. Lerato is nominated to be Headgirl because she is the prettiest girl in school and also happens to be light skin).

Discard those ideas and fight the injustices, not the people. Darker-skinned people are not centering everything around them because they are only now getting the recognition they deserve, they are centering conversations around to enlighten everyone on their struggles and their difficulties of occasionally being seen but not heard.