When the Very thing that’s supposed to protect you is Used against you.

The colour of my skin. My skin. Brown. Brown. Brown.

Deprived of sun for so many years. When the sun touches my skin, a blessing indeed. My skin keeps it. The darkening, it keeps for the months of winter. It may fade on my face, yet my legs, my arms my shoulders, absorbed every moment of sun I could gather. For the first time in my life at 31 I spent a summer soaking in the sun.

Such a natural thing for my ancestors. For what my skin is really for. Though my skin went through the brutality of adaption, of assimilation. Of the expectation that everything glorious should be and is white or as close to it as you can get.

The very thing that is built to protect me, is used against me. The skin holding me together, like my mother’s arms, like my father’s hands. It is used against me. My mother became my sworn enemy, my father became the ghost that would haunt me.

Though they still think that this is not something that is serious. Not something real. According to those whose hand was and is never in the fire it is nothing but figments of imagination or theory in a book. In a book they write, after they’ve studied and scrutinised and probed. A book they can get a certificate for. A book they can give themselves a pat on the back for; qualified.

Qualified in my dehumanisation. Qualified, certified, rubber stamped.