A Facebook Post Reminded Me How Far Back My Relationship with Colorism Goes.
As a Black kid growing up in South Louisiana I was unknowingly learning the colorist ways of my environment.
Back in my middle school days, I had a regular in-class bully named Wilbur that everyone called by his nickname “Boosie.” Now, to be fair calling Boosie a bully is not 100 percent accurate as he was more of an antagonist who was very good at antagonizing his classmates.
Boosie was a very dark-skinned, fat kid with a sizable gap in his front teeth. As a Black kid growing up in South Louisiana, his skin tone alone made him a target of being “ribbed”, but when combined with his weight and teeth, his pigmentation made him ripe for the pickings when the kids in our classes would ‘drive on each other.’
He was, however, an antagonist because he usually would start talking shit about other people before anyone would say anything about him. Boosie reveled in being a class clown, and in retrospect, very likely looked to beat our classmates to the punch before they inevitably started clowning him. The thing was, I wasn’t one of the kids who would joke on him, but for a while, I was a convenient target for Boosie to test out new material.
As a small-framed, medium-brown kid with a highly noticeable overbite, I had a few physical traits that made me the butt of many of Boosie’s jokes. For weeks I would endure him giving me random nicknames based on my appearance and having other classmates join him in poking fun at me. I was never sure if snapping back at him would lead to him wanting to fight me, and because he was a great deal bigger than me, I didn’t want to run the risk of being pummeled and as a consequence, being subjected to more insults.
When I told my parents about the constant teasing I was enduring from Boosie and others, my mother, in all her classroom school teacher logic, wanted me to inform my teachers about what was going on so they could take disciplinary action against my hecklers. My father, on the other hand, advised me to strike back and find anything unattractive about them to dig in whenever they would start making fun of me.
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