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.

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    11 months ago

    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