VIEWPOINTS
Let the Children Come to Me...
(well, the White ones anyway) by Peter Cruchley, Council for World Mission
One of my most painful moments in the CWM Legacies of Slavery Hearings was in Jamaica. Our group met with twenty
young people, all students at the University of the West Indies. They began to open up about their perceptions of blackness and the pressures around them as young black people in Jamaica. They were outwardly confident gifted young people but several began to tell about their attempts to bleach their skin, to try and look fair. Those with the darkest skin colour shared that even in Jamaica they experience prejudice, and felt looked down upon. Beauty is perceived in terms of fair skin colour, the fairer your skin the more beautiful you are. Some even told stories of friends who had even attempted to bleach the skin of their babies.
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