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As I was shopping for moisturizers here in Manila, I came across an odd product. Whitening cream, something I had heard about but had never seen before coming to Asia. It is certainly not a product I had seen in the states. I had to wonder is there any place on Earth where the color of skin is just accepted, is there somewhere in the world where people are happy with their color?
I am a color my husband likes to call alabaster, although my skin has also been described as pasty. I refer to my color as fish belly white. I am very, very pale and all traces of pigment that my not so distant ancestress, a former slave, had in abundance has faded completely from my genes. My husband is a Filipino and has much darker skin than me.
Living in the southwestern United States, my husband is much better adapted to the sundrenched desert than me. After all our skin color is merely an adaptation to our environment, nothing more. My ancestors had to survive in the misty bog lands and forests of Europe, while his lived in the tropics. If my ancestors were lucky enough to have the sun light hit them they had to make the most of it, so skin became lighter to produce the enough vitamin D. It changed from its original brown to pale white.
My husband had an advantage over me in the bright desert sun. He and our other good friends who also had the fortune of being descended from people who were darker could bask in the sun after a day swimming in our pool. They sat sipping frozen drinks as I slathered on sun block and ran under beach umbrellas wrapping myself like a mummy to avoid getting burned. Although my skin may have looked prettier with a tan it would be damaging to expose it to more sun than it was intended to take, and that was okay with me.
There is nice attributes to be fair skinned. As I am very pale I look rather nice in dark colors as they set off my light coloring. I do not resent how I was made. I am just as I was intended to be and I don’t want to be anything else.
I love the color of my husband’s skin; he is a chocolate brown, the color of warm coco. I love his skin not so much because of his color but because it covers him, the person inside. The person who knows me better than anyone ever will, the person who has been with me for so many years I can barely remember what life was like before him.
I love his face with his flat broad nose and deep brown eyes, so dark they look black. I love his face because it is what I see when I look at him, the person behind those dark eyes. He is the person who brings me down off my high horse when I get to full of myself. He is the person who when I am feeling defeated reminds me of all my successes and tells me there is no challenge I cannot face.
He makes me laugh so hard I beg him to stop. He also can frustrate me to no end, when he drones on and on about some disagreement but life would be dull if he just mirrored my thoughts and I because of his different views I grow as a person so I cherish that too. He is my fellow member of the Horde as we adventure together through Azeroth in World of Warcraft, as we are hopelessly addicted to our unending quest to defeat the Alliance scum. He brings out what best in me and helps me work on my faults. He is my best friend.
And when I was leaving all that I ever knew to go to the land of his ancestors, a place where I am completely alien, I could not stop crying. He looked into my teary blue green eyes and told me he would follow me to the ends of the Earth if I thought it was the right thing to do, because he believes in me and I have never let him down.
It did not matter his skin is brown as the soil of his parents native country, it did not matter that my skin is as pale as the mists of my ancestors’ homelands. The only thing that was important is that our hearts were meant to be together. The color of skin is just a small part of what we are, why do we let it define us so much?