{"id":39725,"date":"2015-01-28T17:18:06","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T17:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39725"},"modified":"2015-01-28T17:18:06","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T17:18:06","slug":"skin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39725","title":{"rendered":"Skin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mixedrootsstories.com\/skin\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>Skin<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mixedrootsstories.com\" target=\"_blank\">Mixed Roots Stories<\/a><br \/>\n2015-01-26<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.unf.edu\/coas\/english\/Prof__Tru_Leverette.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Tru Leverette<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English<br \/>\n<em>University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cI wish I had white skin,\u201d my three year-old daughter said, swinging breezily at the park.<\/p>\n<p>Gulp. \u201cWhy do you say that, Sweetheart?\u201d I asked, outwardly calm but inwardly exclaiming, <em>Shit! What do I do with this?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cBecause all of the friends at school have white skin.\u201d Very matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n<p>***<\/p>\n<p>I think about race a lot, both professionally and personally, and perhaps more than the average person. I work as a professor teaching race-related literature classes and grew up as a \u201cbrown-skinned white girl,\u201d as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.soc.ucsb.edu\/faculty\/france-winddance-twine\" target=\"_blank\">France Winddance Twine<\/a> has called mixed race girls <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=7704\" target=\"_blank\">raised in white households and predominantly white communities<\/a>. I remember as a preschooler myself in the 1970s telling my teacher that I wished I had long, blonde hair (and presumably pale skin) and, though I\u2019m embarrassed to admit this deep-seated desire I held at the time, pastel underwear. So I wasn\u2019t entirely surprised that my daughter, the beautifully brown-skinned child of her mixed race father and I, would develop feelings similar to those I\u2019d had as a child, given the predominantly white school she attended.<\/p>\n<p>But so soon? And how <em>did<\/em> she internalize the idea that dark skin is undesirable when she hasn\u2019t been a TV watcher and has been celebrated with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Doc_McStuffins\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Doc McStuffins<\/em><\/a> and brown baby dolls?&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/mixedrootsstories.com\/skin\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Skin Mixed Roots Stories 2015-01-26 Tru Leverette, Associate Professor of English University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida \u201cI wish I had white skin,\u201d my three year-old daughter said, swinging breezily at the park. Gulp. \u201cWhy do you say that, Sweetheart?\u201d I asked, outwardly calm but inwardly exclaiming, Shit! What do I do with this? \u201cBecause [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,414,125,8,20],"tags":[15960,3968],"class_list":["post-39725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-family","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-mixed-roots-stories","tag-tru-leverette"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}