Growing up in Jamaica, an island where the majority of the population is of African descent, I never truly understood the controversies surrounding race and racial identity, simply because I never confronted it. For me, race and racial identity were just foreign concepts that, although I had read about at great length and while watching the international news, heard many accounts of various encounters with these concepts, these concepts never materialized fully in my daily life. Therefore, as a child I always proudly identified as black and identifying as a black girl had never impeded my dreams, hopes or aspirations in anyway. Although admittedly in Jamaica under the broader label of black we had various subgroups; brown skin, light skin, red skin, yellow skin, mulato, and coolie, however, at the end of the day we all acknowledged that racially we are black.
While in Jamaica, being black simply defined the color of my skin and my moderately proportioned amounts of melanin never dictated my standing in society, my educational background nor did it provide the preface to my story. It simply served as what I had believed was its purpose; give me a beautiful dark chocolate complexion, which I was extremely proud of as it meant that when I went to the beach-which was often-I could wear little to no sunscreen without …show more content…
I received this assignment not on a basis of my scholastic achievements nor my many worldly travels but simply because of my race but even more so because of the color of my skin. It was at this moment for the first time in my life that my beloved moderately proportioned amounts of melanin played the major role in my defining my identity. I was no long Gabrielle that plump girl from Montego Bay, I became Gabrielle a person of color. These new labels then played an major role in the way in which many people saw me on campus and our
While in Jamaica, being black simply defined the color of my skin and my moderately proportioned amounts of melanin never dictated my standing in society, my educational background nor did it provide the preface to my story. It simply served as what I had believed was its purpose; give me a beautiful dark chocolate complexion, which I was extremely proud of as it meant that when I went to the beach-which was often-I could wear little to no sunscreen without …show more content…
I received this assignment not on a basis of my scholastic achievements nor my many worldly travels but simply because of my race but even more so because of the color of my skin. It was at this moment for the first time in my life that my beloved moderately proportioned amounts of melanin played the major role in my defining my identity. I was no long Gabrielle that plump girl from Montego Bay, I became Gabrielle a person of color. These new labels then played an major role in the way in which many people saw me on campus and our