u/vanillaswerll

Black Americans with albinism are still frequently racially misidentified, ostracized, and, more often than people realize, denied the “Black experience.” I understand that much of this comes from ignorance and a lack of knowledge but at a certain point remaining ignorant is a choice.

And since y’all love to say “Black comes in all shades“ the Black community needs to actually live by that statement. That means becoming more familiar with and educated about albinism because we are your people too.

I was misidentified a lot as a child. Nowadays I mostly experience it through social media and overly woke Black people try to police me about the N-word despite the fact that I’m Black myself. Having albinism does not give us some special privilege or exempt us from racism. If anything, the only “privilege” we have is based on stereotypical ideas surrounding colorism.

My parents gave me Black features in ALL CAPS. It usually takes white people about 60 seconds to clock my tea that I’m Black and Black people much longer than that time. And people still act as though having a different skin color means we’re removed from the Black experience.

We still experience racism, discrimination, police brutality, prejudice, and all the other realities that come with being Black. It’s not because we lack melanin that our lives become sunshine and rainbows. Albinism does not erase our Blackness, our culture or the racism we experience because of it.

I grew up quite privileged and my parents were always able to provide the needed things for me such as good sun cream and a good optometrist and they always paid attention to me so I was never picked on or dealt with any harsh bullying because of my Albinism which i’m thankful for. The only time I’d say I was discriminated was when I was in elementary school. But it wasn’t that deep for me because it was things like being called white washed by other black people because I was already different from them and it didn’t help that I had different music and dances interests.

Why I say it wasn’t that deep is because even other kids my age around that time who didn’t have albinism would still get called white washed for their interests. Or stuff like “she wants to be white” I never actually took it to heart though. But now that i’m much older I really struggle when it comes to men especially some Black men because they can be odd.

A few year ago I had a boyfriend who would ask me if we got married when we were older, would our child be albino too and I told him probably not because it doesn’t occur in every generation in my family and it’s also dependent on if the father’s side (in my case) has a person with albinism.

He seemed pretty bummed out about it when he was talking about it. It was pretty odd because he was on some “ I wanna have an albino child so bad” “they’re so cute” “I bet you were so cute when you were younger” and whenever we would get into a disagreement he started to insult my skin color saying i’ll never be black. And some older men would tell me “the prettiest one in a million Albino I’ve ever seen” I always block people like that because that is weird to imply Albinism is ugly. It’s always been a mix of fetishizing and disrespect when it comes to dating/men (black and non-black men)

I’m 20F Black American.

Hi! I'm a Black American girl with Albinism and I'm looking for a subreddit where I can connect with other Black Americans. I'm new to Reddit so l'm not really sure where to look. Does anyone know of any communities like that?