When I grew up, the narrative was always light hair/eyes features = good, dark hair&eyes = ugly/boring, or even outright bad. It was so bad, as a small child I was looking into the progress of the surgery which lightens your eye color and was obsessing over dyeing my hair. The trend during my teenage years which had practically all successful "e-celebs" wearing contacts to hide their dark eyes was a symptom and certainly didn't help. I recently saw the narrative being propagated online by people from many different countries, so I know it's not specific to where I was.
I still battle the sense of inadequacy based on my inborn features. Logically, I don't, but I keep having intrusive thoughts about my hair and eye color.
There was a boy in my middleschool bullied PROFOUNDLY for having dark hair and eyes and darker skin. I was always treated like my "redeeming" quality is my pale skin, but it's a result of me being sickly and not an inherited trait.
I was also lead to believe something was wrong with me, because my biological father has black hair and very light eyes, which are seen as attractive, and my biological mother religiously dyes her hair ensuring they're never brown, so as a child with the narrative of dark hair&eyes being wrong and seeing neither of my biological parents displayed that, I thought I was faulty.
I feel like it recently resurfaced, because I had my entire DNA analyzed for medical purposes, but I also saw unexpressed albinism gene in there. I know albinism is a complicated issue, but the life-long prejudice I experienced against my inborn traits is not something I can logically get rid of, because it's not logical.
Are there any resources on this, especially on dealing with this? I'm realizing it's been affecting my self esteem, even when I wasn't aware of it.
As a disclaimer, I'm not from nor in Northern America so USA-centric stuff won't help me. I also don't judge anyone by this, it's just hatred I internalized and is affecting my own self perception and therefore my life.
I'm really white so I don't have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It's an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.
It's no self-help book and it won't be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you're experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.
I am "white" though (family with both sides adopted so exact ethnicity isn't known for sure, but where I was born people thought I was an immigrant as well). Just not recognized as the proper type by people who think you're subhuman if you have both dark eyes and hair. I doubt my struggles match that of black people and I don't dare to compare.
Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!
Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That's really rough.
I'm sorry but I really can't think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.
Can relate. For context: I'm from European part of Russia, and am of Jewish descent. So I too have black hair and dark eyes, while most people around are at least brown-ish in hair and with light eyes. People of my complexion are either immigrants or otherwise considered "foreign".
I deal with it the same way I deal with everything else - hunker down and carry on. Not a useful advice at all, but idk what else to do. There won't be any kind of decrease of racist bs until another socialist revolution
I have pale skin, like really pale, but black hair and I ws tol few times unironiclly that ''brown or blonde is better''.
And fascists and rcists here in Balkns really have something against Roma and migrants from Middle East/North Africa and every time I even hear them talking about it I remember that Tito didn't go far enough in Bleiburg.
It's a 100% inheritance from settler colonialism. I think it's slowly going away, the microagressions come primarily from old people.
Still nicknames like "prieto" (derogatory for dark skinned) and "guero" (same but for light skinned) are incredibly common.
