“Why Would anyone want to be Darker?”

Earlier this week I went out to dinner with a really good friend of mine and with us were two of her other friends that I didn’t really know. (I’m Black, they are all White) Since we became friends she has taught me a lot of Jewish cultural things and I have taught her Black cultural things to keep us from being so ignorant about the other. While I usually find it offensive when people ask me to educate them on “Blackness” we both have the understanding that I am only speaking for myself and I know she is trying to keep from being so ignorant. Well she decided to ask why her sorority sister (who is one of about 3 Black girls in her sorority) went tanning with them the other day. When I asked what she meant, one of her friends said, “but wouldn’t tanning make her darker?” with a perplexed look on her face. It took a lot for me to swallow what I wanted to say, that not all people hate dark skin and think it’s hideous like you do, and instead I just shrugged and said everyone is different. Everyone, both White and Black, talk about dark skin as ugly, not as an opinion, but as though it’s fact and as though beautiful very dark skinned people are an anomaly.