an essay i did for school

Brown

For as long as I can remember, my mom used to tell me I wasn't dark-skinned. I never understood the difference beyond wanting to distance myself from people with darker skin than mine. Everyone around me in my childhood was described as white or fair-skinned, while I was just brown.

I was 12 years old when I started hating my skin tone, which is still an ongoing struggle, but not with the same intensity as back then. I used to search on YouTube at 2 a.m. for "ways to lighten skin tone," and I even fell for those "subliminal audios," which never felt real, but I just wanted to feel like I was doing something to change what I was.

The jokes from my friends calling me Black or treating me as inferior to them in middle school always affected me, but I never wanted to show it.

Mexico isn't a white country, it's not in Europe, but I still experience discrimination every day simply for being like the majority in the country. I always wonder, how is it possible that there's so much racism in a country where more than 50% of the population is brown? These are things I don't think I have an answer to, or that anyone will ever answer me. Because we're used to living with constant discrimination due to the backward mentality that most people have.

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Sometimes I still scrub my face hard every time I shower, like a muscle memory that will never go away. I spent years doing it, hoping my skin was just dirt, grime that would eventually wash off with time and leave me as white as everyone else.

The breaking point came with my ex-boyfriend, who made racist comments, justifying them as jokes. Every time I sent him a picture of myself, he'd call me Black, saying that if we were in ancient times I'd be his slave. I never said anything; I guess love blinded me.

I stopped taking pictures and going out for the entire vacation. The feeling of the sun touching my skin only made me paranoid, thinking I was going to get even more tanned. I think it was the vacation where I used the most sunscreen.

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The world made me hate my skin, something I was born with and can't change no matter how much I want to. I question whether I'm truly comfortable with my skin again or if I'm just convincing myself that I can't do anything about it and all that's left is to relearn how to live with it, to ignore those comments, and to love living in my own body again.

I'm brown, and no one can take that away from me. Why should I be ashamed of something my mother passed down to me? Something my ancestors passed down to me, something the Indigenous peoples, whom I love and study with great passion, passed down to me.

Racism exists in Mexico, the Mexico that abolished slavery, the Mexico that had a Black president, whom they whitewash because being Black doesn't give the appearance that racists want Vicente Guerrero to have.

Racism is strange; I've always considered it so, although internalized racism won in that internal struggle I had. Why should someone be hated for something they can't change? Why should someone be hated if they've done nothing wrong? We're all human, we're all going to die, we're all going to suffer. Mockery only prolongs or brings on that suffering. And not everyone can bear it.