Writer unleashes his candid, brutal, unfiltered, raw, blunt views decrying skin bleaching in Africa. If my language is too forceful and hurts your little feelings, then I have hugely succeeded in what I set out to do. I want to hurt your feelings because I think a robustly truculent pushback is now needed to kibosh this metastasizing claptrap that trashes our beautiful black skin. There’s just no nice way to tackle this burgeoning mess. Popular host of Straight Talk LIVE Radio One Khari Enahoro could not have phrased it any better when he said, “When you don’t like Black, you have a mental health problem.” There you have it.
Onumba.com, USA — Several months ago, African-American model and entrepreneur Blac Chyna was in Nigeria for business and somewhere during the visit, she pigged out on rice. And she loved it, so much so, she expressed her feelings about it.
“Nigerian jollof [Rice] is so bomb,” she noted.
Yeah —— it was cool of her to pour compliments on one of Africa’s beloved dishes.
But cool or not, the feeling for me is not mutual. I am glad she enjoyed the rice, though. It still doesn’t dismiss the fact that she is a pathetic snollyggoster whose global enterprise of peddling bleaching cream tramples on our race and disrespects scores of towering Black icons who gave their life to secure its grace, pride and dignity. Blac Chyna is profiting from an organized assault on the Black race. And for that, she should be mightily ashamed of herself. Quite frankly, she can make a beeline to hell with her phony, kowtowing jollof rice paean.
Why the harsh pillory, you ask
Well, here’s why —- a smorgasbord of reasons for you. Right off the bat, I unapologetically, furiously and emphatically abhor skin whitening of any kind. I love my black skin, thank you very much. And those involved in any business which deluges Africa with skin whitening products are losers who belong to a pantheon of scumbags —- users and peddlers alike.
With that start, there should be no confusion about where I stand on this issue. I am not one to tiptoe around the menacing foolishness of skin whitening or sugarcoat my livid and profound disdain for it. I immediately call on African governments to outright outlaw these products and ban them from being brought into the continent. Some already have. That’s good. But we need to do more, perhaps at the grassroot level, where ordinarily folks should always display disgust for it. For me, I intensely cringe in chafe every time I see Africans galumphing around with bleached faces. They believe ditching their ‘god-awful’ black skin is cool. But there really is nothing cool about that. If anything, those who embrace this vastly unhinged practice often appear visibly phony, very unhappy and distressed, patched up and messed up, always donning a subdued hint of dissatisfaction and self induced turmoil, and above all distastefully distorted in the face. Furthermore, they appear really terrible, miserable, almost to the cusp where you begin to feel sorry for them knowing that they are hopelessly toiling in a losing endeavor. Even more, they often appear mentally and physically tormented and caged in a psychological conundrum of their own making. Yes, you have managed to chemically alter your black face into a yellow, pale thing, but it looks phony, very phony. Trust me, it does. Yet, for the life of me, they don’t even see their own bloated foolishness and destructive indulgencies.
Tell them the brutal truth
Shockingly, close friends and loved ones rarely bother to talk these narcissistic, small minded wackos out of their misguided pursuit of enhanced look. The way I see it, by relatives not dropping hints of disapproval or even outright letting them know the truth about the catastrophic consequences of this conduct to their health, as well as the fundamental truth that it doesn’t add a modicum of value to their beauty stock, it only deepens the false sense of aesthetic enhancement they think they are gaining from these skin whitening creams. In short, not engaging them with the brutal truth, as insensitive as it may be, only strengthens their dogged and misguided devotion to these destructive commodities, thereby entrenching the impetus for them to cling on to this global falsehood about our dark skin being ugly. And what that does is deepen the fierce urgency they feel to peel off their dark skin at any cost and replace it with a white one. There really is no nice and delicate way to wade into this tragedy without compromising the gravity of the matter. It is astronomically mind-boggling, even approaching the epitome of masochistic idiocy, perhaps brazen childishness as well, to indulge in this stuff. Just be comfortable in your natural skin, please. And it is particularly depressing to see this nonsense flourishing in a dystopian Africa where everyone’s focus should be on pertinent issues of social development, economic growth and improvement in education for our impoverished children — not on aesthetic bullcrap. I’m just keeping it real, folks.
Chyna in Nigeria
And there was smarmy Ms. Chyna, 30, whose real name is Angela Renee White, in Nigeria peddling her garbage, teaming up with Cameroonian crooner Dencia, who reportedly started Whitenicious. They organized Whitenicious shindig to push Blac Chyna’s collections in Nigeria. Everyone was invited to the party. News about the event spread faster than the ugly patch of swollen sores you often see on the faces of consumers of these atrocious creams. Even though Black Chyna’s budding aesthetic enterprise features a gallimaufry of products, she was in Nigeria particularly to hype her crown jewel: “Whitenicious X Black Chyna Diamond Illuminating & Lightening Cream.”
The purpose of this product, I graciously remind you, is to help you swap your purportedly ‘god-awful’ dark skin with a supposedly attractive and glorified white one. Can you for a moment picture a throng of people hurriedly trooping into Whitenicious event and stuck in their little mind is one central question: How in the world do I peel off my ugly dark skin? These feeble minded people are the reason these products are booming commercially. They have foolishly bought the monumental lie and absurd notion that dark African skin is intrinsically unattractive. If that’s true, then it would be fair to say that your mother, your grandmother and your great grandmother were all born hapless victims of a vile curse that condemned them to unattractive creatures. Now wouldn’t it? You too, of course, are also very unattractive. So brothers and sisters, is that the kind of African teaching you want to pass on to your children, your grandchildren and your great grandchildren? That their innate black skin is an ugly curse and not worth keeping.
Ms. Chyna, I graciously remind you, is on record for saying she does not even use this product. She and Dencia, who hails from neighboring Cameroon, knew precisely where in Africa to hold their Whitenicious shindig, oh yeah, the great Nigeria —- where “77 percent” of folks, mostly women, are hopelessly roped into the destructive rote of skin whitening. And by setting up shop in Nigeria with its burgeoning population of nearly 200 million, they were for sure swooning to exploit the large number of consumers craving these poisonous goods.
This stuff is not cheap, either
Now, here comes the real kicker. The cream goes for a whopping $250 a pop, which sums up to roughly 90,000 Naira.
Ouch.
Now, you would think that ridiculously steep price would force a lot of folks to retreat from buying it. But even at that staggering cost, even with their economic morose, Nigerians hopelessly hooked on this stuff will fetch it. Why? Again, they are desperate to get rid of their ugly black skin. Heck —- they will run over broken glasses to get their hands on it —- delighted, for the life of me, that it does enhance their aesthetic value. But it doesn’t. It never has, it never will. Still, those who use it, moo moo around with the spurious sense of enhanced aesthetic self worth when actually it only casts them as pitiful and foolish.
Shingi Mtero, a lecturer at Rhodes University in South Africa, expressed the view that “Black women who bleach their skin believe that it will give them access and power.” Yep, that’s what they believe, but it doesn’t —- at all. This is nothing but the aesthetic edition of Orwellian hogwash fuelled by quixotic, crazy and irrational perception.
Sometimes reasoning with these folks is like talking to Zucchini. If being light skinned is the easy path to the city of Pulchritude, then you would also agree, logically, that every white person out there (by virtue of simply being White) is beautiful. Yeah — be as white as Idaho picket fence to be pretty. So —– the innately perfect White Skin, which is what you believe, even though you probably won’t admit it when phrased that pointedly, becomes the lens through which you view your own inherent skin color foibles and inadequacies. 
Here is what it boils down to: The color of your skin is not, and never will be a determinant of beauty. Please, please understand me. No race or ethnicity has a trademark, copyright or monopoly on beauty. Beauty resides in every color, every race and every ethnicity. Of course, there are beautiful White people but it has nothing to do with their skin color being White. There are also beautiful Black people with dark skin. There are beautiful Asian people. There are beautiful Arab people. Your skin color is not what makes you beautiful or unattractive. If that’s what you think, you have been duped. Take retired NBA star Dwayne Wade’s significant other Gabrielle Union for instance. Most people would agree, I think, that she is impeccably gorgeous. But guess what, she is not light-skinned. She is dark-skinned. So how come she is pretty?
Taken together, if you are among the wacko cabal of Africans wasting your hard earned money consuming bottles and bottles of bleaching cream, believing that your monstrous and unsightly self (yep, that’s you) will soon be a racial curse of the past, you are hopelessly dangling in worst ilk of quixotic daydreaming and comic absurdity. In short, you are simply chasing shadow, displaying your vast ignorance for the world to see and in the process making utter fool of yourself.
It is worth noting, for those who might be tempted to twist all of this out of shape, that the issue is not with being light-skinned. No. As I noted already, beauty comes in all colors. The problem, actually foolishness is a better word, is intentionally dissing and peeling off your Black skin because you view it with disdain and deem it ugly and inferior.
It is frustrating, to say the least
The depressing tragedy about all of this comes from knowing that vociferous crusaders against skin bleaching in Africa, which includes me, are in an uphill battle. We are working aggressively to expose the absolute foolishness of this practice, decrying skin bleaching from the rooftop, but when folks like Blac Chyna —– a stripper turned entrepreneur —- is able to easily jet into the continent with all the celebrity hoopla, rabidly pushing these skin whitening products, it drowns out our voice, slows down our momentum and becomes a major obstacle to accomplishing our goal of ridding the entire continent of this poisonous garbage. Still, as tough as it is to fend off celebs like Blac Chyna, it is even a taller order trying to pry loose these hopelessly brainwashed Africans from the taut grip of the claws of desperation and chronic self loath, where so many of them are clearly in dire need of cathartic psychological cleansing from the lingeringly catastrophic residues of slavery and colonialism.
“I try and I try to make them understand, but they just can’t understand. When will they ever learn?”
“Too long, too long in slavery.”
Those are very meaningful lines from great songs by Culture, a roots reggae group formerly led by the late reggae behemoth and Rasta apostle Joseph Hill.
Now that you know how I feel about users and peddlers of skin bleaching creams in Africa, what do you think? Let us know.
