“You are pretty, and I would be interested in you…but you’re not white.”

Growing up in inner city East Orange, New Jersey, it was easy to be relegated to a category based on the darkness or lightness of my skin. But the most difficult part of my story is the one that forces me to come face-to-face with the people who perpetrated this painful practice: other black people.

My skin color is a lighter brown, free of pimples and scars, and velvety smooth. Yet in my own community, black—my black, anyway—was not considered beautiful.

My community contains diverse people whose varied skin tones form a rich palette of blackness. Yet, on any given day, people make it their business to “out” dark or “out” light someone else! In my Jamaican culture, I know family members who bleach their skin in a frantic desperation to be a light-skinned black.

I decided that I will not conform to this idea by embracing my “imperfect skin," and to be the most respected brown-skinned black girl I could be. But first, I needed to find a way to make my herculean feat possible.

My herculean moment came during a high school social gathering in my ninth grade year at my boarding school, my home-away-from-home for four years. The incident that tested my mettle agitated the skin color ideologies that had defined so much of my life in East Orange.

It all happened in a bowling alley with black male students from another college prep boarding school. They vociferously and publicly denounced my brown skin beauty and went as far as assuming I was Cuban, Brazilian, or Dominican. Anything but black. One young man went so far as to ask me to delete his number after I explained that I was black, he stood there with a look of absolute disgust as he scornfully said,“There is no way you could be black.”

To further emphasize his colorism, the same student pretended to be deaf when my dark-skinned sister approached him to ask a question, only to fully demonstrate his underdeveloped thought process. It has been said that old ways of thinking die hard. And these ways of thinking about skin color in the black community are rooted in a slave narrative that encouraged black people to privilege lighter skin over darker skin people.

Today, in so much of popular culture, teens are confronted with the perception that whiter-looking blacks are more desirable and more successful. Though a myth, the thought has great power. The power of colorism still paralyzes the black community because relationships that can transform and heal are immediately sabotaged.

The discomfort I felt after leaving the bowling alley that night ignited my desire to learn more about colorism and try to fully understand why someone would ever question my beautiful melanin.

My sister is beautiful.

Her skin glows in a way that is indescribable. She is a 450 in Fenty Foundation and trophy wife sits perfectly on her cheekbones. Anyone who turns their eye to her is the only one missing out.

Yes, I am on the lighter side of the spectrum, nothing will come between me and my fellow black sisters because, “black is just black” and anyone who praises lighter skin or shuns the darker complexion is simply not comfortable in his or her own skin.