This is Still Happening!

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a ballerina. I loved my tutu and the ballet bag my mom bought me. I would dress up at home, practice my pliés and relevés, and imagine myself becoming a ballerina one day.

**In the audio format, you will hear me say "swipe for next page," but disregard it, as you can just listen without doing anything :)

Then I finally got the chance to take ballet lessons. But when I walked into that classroom, I noticed immediately that no one looked like me. Then another little girl looked at my brown skin, called it “poop,” and wiped her arm after accidentally touching mine, as if I had a contagious disease.

I was just a child, but I remember the feeling. The embarrassment, the hurt, and the feeling that something about me was wrong.

I didn’t stop loving ballet. I stopped feeling safe enough to pursue it outside of home. And unfortunately, this happened with many other things I wanted to do.

Looking back as an adult, I understand that this experience was about more than one hurtful comment. It became part of a much larger pattern of racial experiences that shaped how I saw myself, how I moved through the world, and how often I felt safe enough to be fully myself.

For years, I thought I was simply “shy.” It wasn’t until much later, through therapy, that I began to understand myself differently. I wasn’t a different person at home and outside of home. I was the same playful, expressive, creative little girl. I had simply learned where it was safe to be her.

This is one of many childhood memories I carry, and I’m sharing it because I know I’m not the only one. Children absorb far more than we realize. They notice who is included, who is celebrated, who is considered beautiful, and who is treated as different. They can begin internalizing those messages long before they have the words to explain what they are experiencing.

And something happened just a few years ago that brought this childhood memory right back to me:

When I lived in Hawaii, a white American girl who was my neighbor came to me crying after school. Other white children had told her that her skin was “poop” and asked her why she was so dark because she happened to have a beautiful, naturally tan, olive complexion. She told me sadly that she didn’t want to be brown and asked why her skin had to be brown. I talked with her about it and shared my own story of experiencing something very similar around the same age, when I was five/six.

And I’ll say this plainly: from the late 80s and early 90s to today, we need to do better. Parents, society, systems, all of us. Because there are children who never make remarks like this about someone else’s skin color. So the question is, why are some children learning, at such a young age, to belittle another child for having brown skin? Where are they learning that?

Children are not born believing that one skin color is better than another. They learn these ideas. And that means we have a responsibility to be intentional about what we teach, what we model, what we normalize, and what we challenge.

Every child deserves to feel safe being exactly who they are. Different skin shades. Different hair textures. Different cultures. Different bodies. Different ways of communicating and expressing themselves. Different ways of experiencing the world.

None of these differences are wrong, and no child should have to shrink themselves because of them.

This is why I share my stories. To remember the little girl I was. To honor what she experienced. To continue healing and unlearning, and to look at how far I’ve come. 🩰🤎

And hopefully, to help someone else feel a little less alone.

If you’ve experienced something similar, I hope you know there was never anything wrong with you.

#ballet #education #family #children #kids #marriage #couples #racism #decolonization