Everyday Struggle.

I'll never forget the day I was introduced to prejudice when I was thirteen years old, remembering the hurt and humiliation an encounter that would hurt any young youth badly. I was not introduced to prejudice by a person from different ethnicity but my very own African American race. It was the battle of "Light skin versus dark skin," a topic and a fight that many blacks would rather not confront interracial prejudice, which has been the topic of many lunchroom or bullying sessions while I was in school. On the issue of apparently how black your skin was compared to lighter skin classmates is the memory that has never faded.

That happened nearly ten years ago. I'm an adult now, even though the memory has now started to fade away. But the words of my peers still linger In my head, recreated by other situations when resolving a conflict amongst my students in data in which a child's skin color is judged by other youth. A prejudice encounter hurts badly, but it doesn't equal the pain of being bullied by your own people. I have now dedicated my time to influence my students to believe our scale of beauty is often defined by the qualities within us.

I was thirteen, and In my first year of junior high school in San Francisco, I discovered dark brown was not supposed to be beautiful. At the age when girls became more important, so did my social identity. Being judged by my own culture created a lot of self-hatred for many dark-skinned peers my age. It wasn't until I heard the quote " Black is beautiful" during the time of Afrocentric hip-hop in the ear1990s0's that git gave me hope. With the help of individuals, at least we can try to understand that color biases and bullying effects are the generations of youth. There is only so much we can do because we need the cooperation of others to make it go away. But healing ourselves is within our own control.