Skip to main content

Sun Baking

She lay on the chaise lounge face down on the deck of the pool, a few feet from the edge of the water. It was mid-day and the sun bore down on her intensely, baking her skin into a light golden bronze. Casually, she slid her spaghetti strap down her left shoulder to the side of her bikini bra. She didn’t want a tan line there. She wanted her upper body nice and even.

Not too far away, a dark-skinned woman looked out the window of the clubhouse overlooking the resort’s lazy river pool and noticed the middle-aged woman baking in the sun. The dark-skinned lady thought about how she would love to catch a few sun rays herself, since it was good for her body in it’s conversion of Vitamin D.

But, she didn’t understand the point of sun bathing to the point of obsession. She recalled back one time while in Acapulco, while relaxing out by the pool with a good book in hand, noticing an elderly gentleman laying out next to her, covered in what looked like lesions of melanoma.

Of course, her dark skin gave her the protection to lay out a few hours longer than lighter skinned folks before she would ever have to worry about sun damage.

She loved her dark-reddish brown complexion. She thought what the Lord gave her was beautiful. She also loved the natural color of her lighter-skinned friends and family members. But she realized as she watched the lady below roast her skin into something deadly, was that everyone these days seem to think that the grass is always greener on the other side.

Fairer skinned people sometimes long to be darker, and darker skinned people sometimes long to be lighter. She thought of all those young girls in Africa investing in jars of skin cream to make their complexions a shade different so that they would think that they know beauty.

Or even yet, of all those young girls with curly or kinky hair who have yet to embrace their crown of glory in their nature texture, because they have hidden it away under the guise of straightners, relaxers, wigs and weaves.

The dark-skinned woman in the clubhouse wondered when people would wake up and realize that just being Human was beautiful in itself. Naturally. No alterations necessary. When will people wake up and just be. The dark-skinned woman took one last look out the window and turned to walk away, but not before first muttering to her self;

“I need to lose weight. Maybe today I’ll start my diet?”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I’m Not Going To Let The 2010 Census Define Me

I hope I don’t get in trouble, but I had been putting off filling out my 2010 Census Form, and now that I have filled it out, I may not have given the response that the government wanted to see. I had been aware of the controversy regarding the word Negro, and I wasn’t too eager to deal with it. Still, I completely expected to have the opportunity to check a box that read Black, or a box that read African American or a box that read Negro. Instead, last night as I sat down to fill out my form, I discovered lumped together under one box to check, read the line.... Black, African American or Negro. Hmm... So have we fully embraced this new millennium or have we traveled back in time to the 1920’s? I remember last month talking with my Grandmother regarding the latest census and asking what she thought about the word Negro being added, and her response was; “Why did they bring that word back?” My point exactly! The reasoning behind that was because the Census Bureau felt that some older g...

How Safe Am I Really?

Sometimes I don’t feel comfortable in this small town that I reside in. Although most of the time, I think it’s just me. Over the past few years I’ve become a bit paranoid and feel sometimes that pairs of eyes are trying to get a hold of me. Now it doesn’t help here that South Carolina is a conservative red state and that from time to time I’ve seen a confederate flag hanging over the balcony of the apartment across the parking lot from me. Nor does it help that at one time my office was so charged politically that I called in sick the day after President Obama was elected. Still despite all of this, I have felt relatively safe in my surroundings, albeit a bit uncomfortable. But tonight I experienced something so unsettling that I’m just not sure how I should label it. Lately it seems I’ve had a taste for barbeque. A few weeks ago I was intrigued by a quick conversation on identity with the cashier in the drive-thru at Jim N-Nick’s BBQ and today, I decided to visit a new barbeque resta...

The Uproar over Cleopatra and Black/African-American Ancestry

I am so glad my parents decided to do their homework before they named me after a huge powerful figure such as Queen Nefertiti. Nefertiti was known for her beauty and her influence over her kingdom in Egypt and her pharaoh Akhenaton. Although there’s speculation of her birth place, evidence from an archeological dig back in December 1912, when her bust was unearthed, shows that Nefertiti was definitely a deep brown beauty. But not all of her successors have that trait in common. More than a thousand years later, another powerful woman ruled Egypt. Her name was Cleopatra. Cleopatra was of Greek origin and ruled during a period of Greek occupation of Egypt. She was very fair skinned and there is no evidence that there is a direct link to African Ancestry. You can find more details from the blog, BlackInCairo that I follow here... http://blackincairo.blogspot.com/2010/06/cleopatra-aint-black-noise-in-cairo-and.html . So all the folks in the Black community crying because Angelina Jolie is...