In this short clip, a Black student describes how colorism impacts how Black women perceive their beauty. They recall how their friends struggled with self-love and self-confidence because they rarely saw Black women represented in media, convincing them that their Blackness and beauty was wrong. Their journey to self-love has taken a lot of mental gymnastics to recognize that comparative and competitive mentality feeds the media’s and corporation’s perpetuation of colorism; self-love is the only way to combat it and move toward collective confidence.
We need to realize: if we start loving ourselves and stop worrying about what other people do, if we focus on improving ourselves, we can eventually help other people as well.