The world is not block and white

This is my friend, Meg.

Meg and I first met during the ORSEM (Orientation Seminar) in Ateneo back in June 2000. And since then, she became one of my good college friends. She has been an oh-so-reliable benchmate who fought for our tables and carried our benches from far away places back to our area thus earning the name "Amazona". She has been my arnis teammate whose left-handedness was an asset to the team. And of course, she has always been one of my favorite divas and musicians (Jewel style) who would sometimes burst into a song wherever we were. ;)

She's in law school right now and would like to focus on issues regarding our environment in the future. (That's my kind of girl!)

I distinctly remember the first time I bonded with her as I was tinkering with her own concoction of a lip balm. (Another thing that bonded us: our being kikay cowboys.)

Anyhoo, we were discussing her love life (ahem2x) while in the library because we still didn't have a bench during the first day of class (haha!). And I guess we ended up bonding about one of the issues that we faced while growing up. We actually shared this with our other blockmate and friend, Therese. Together, the three of us became vocal about this in college: BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. But then if we really think about it, maybe it should have been a campaign that said "Brown is beautiful". But then if we really THINK about it even more, it should have been a campaign about "learning to love and appreciate what we were born with".

It's funny (actually, NOT FUNNY) that for a people whose ancestors were kayumanggi (slightly dark skinned), we put too much emphasis on wanting to be fair-skinned. Meg grew up getting teased as "Megra". And I had my own share of slight discrimination both during my grade school days and my adolescent years. The most striking was when it was just bluntly said... "but she's too dark!" For a high school student with soaring hormones at that time, my retort to that was "WHAAAAT?". And I immediately wrote something about the issue afterwards. It's still in one of my notebooks somewhere in my drawer at present. I explained there why black (or brown) is beautiful as much as white is.

And now, several years after, I'm blogging about it. ;p

I actually felt that times have changed through the years. Although we still see a lot of whitening products out there (and still a lot of people patronizing them), there are also those who speak up about this issue. For one, there's CAT who I remember to have effectively spoken up/written about this. You can also find her viewpoints in her blog.

Although I don't have enough media mileage for this campaign, I have this little land right here (in my blog) where I am requiring all of you to say to yourself that...

"Black is beautiful."

"Brown is beautiful."

"And variety is beauty in itself."

Isn't the world even more colorful now?


Photos by Louis Fojas
My favorite green earrings courtesy of Sweet (AS walk, UP Diliman)