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The Skin/Hair “Thang”
Between Black Women
As black women in America,
negotiating the minefields of daily life can be a daunting task. With an
erosion of our core value system and a mass media that bombards us with
repeated images of inferior, stereotypical black womanhood, we are often
given the message that it is somehow wrong to love our sisters and our
natural black selves. Thus, cultural and ethnic pride, self-edification,
and a sense of a shared responsibility for our own, are often elusive
ideals that we must work hard to re-claim.
We all know it takes a village to raise a people, and as women of the
village we must strive to cultivate an environment where our daughters
thrive on a steady diet of sisterly love and mutual support. Too often
black women pass judgments about each other based primarily on physical
characteristics of skin tone and hair texture, when in reality we are
all linked in a sisterhood of one blood, of one heart, of one soul.
Other People’s Skin seeks to heal
this rift between black women and to cleanse our sisterly souls of this
polluted by-product of America’s legacy of race-based slavery. The
crab-in-the-barrel mentality that may have at one time been necessary
for our individual survival has now become a purveyor of our collective
demise.
There is safety in numbers, my sisters! It is time to gather our
community resources and use our talents and efforts to correct the ills
that breed dysfunction and prevent us from rising as unified body of
black womanhood and realizing our full potential.
It is our hope that each story in this first volume of our
Sister-for-Sister Empowerment Series will bless you with a healthy dose
of self-love, and provide a healing balm for our generational scars.
We hope that through our literary efforts you are able to find a gem of
solidarity in this work of fiction that is useful in your everyday life.
May you wish for your sisters the same love, serenity, and prosperity
you crave for yourself. May you be blessed with the utmost peace and
balance, and as you travel along the roads of self-discovery with
Carmella, Euleatha, Catherine, and Dahlia, may you always remember…if
the hat fits you must wear it!
-Tracy Price-Thompson and TaRessa Stovall
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