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It’s time to face up to colourism | Candice Brathwaite

As I grew up, the majority of black women I saw on TV were fair skinned. Those who looked like me were never cast as the lead

I’ve been building a profile as a writer and broadcaster long enough to know that there will be public storms. Some creep up on you, others you sense brewing, and some have been lingering in the background for a lifetime.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on social media about having “lost out” on hosting a documentary to a lighter-skinned black woman. The subject of the documentary was maternal mortality in the UK, and the harrowing fact that black women are five times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. This is something I have campaigned on for several years, wrote about in my book I Am Not Your Baby Mother and experienced first-hand when I almost died a few days after the birth of my first child in 2013.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3dOjllm
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