Reading time: 3 minutes
Identity · Revelation
Episode #32
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You're applying the cream. The system is this way, you will beat it from inside.
B — You go as you are, even if you lose the job of your life.
If you chose A
Choosing the cream means recognizing the violence of the system while deciding to survive first. It is a painful pragmatism that bets on the idea that one only transforms a world by entering it. But it's also feeding, on your own skin, the machine that crushes.
If you have chosen B
Refusing cream is a solitary act of resistance that no one may witness. It is honoring a line of women who have carried their skin as a dignity. But it's also risking silence — a telephone that never rings after the interview.
The Aisha dilemma is not cosmetic: it is political. Behind a simple jar of cream concentrates all the architecture of a colorism inherited from colonization, maintained by the advertising industries and normalized by everyday life. When a society combines the clarity of the skin with the skill, beauty, and legitimacy of representing a brand, it creates a trap from which every black woman is both the target and the battlefield.
The one who chooses the cream is not a traitor. She makes a survival calculation in a world that has not asked her for her opinion. She thinks that a conquered position is better than a pride without pay, and that she will change the rules once she sits at the table. But history shows that the system often digests those who thought it would transform from within. The cream applies one evening, then another, and soon it is self-esteem that lightens with the skin.
The one who refuses bears a magnificent and lonely courage. She embodies the memory of her grandmother, the dignity of her mother, the future of her daughter. But courage doesn't pay rent. And invisible resistance — the one playing in a waiting room, without camera or applause — is the most exhausting of all. The risk is real: to be admirable and hungry.
The real question is beyond Aisha. She questions the companies that set these standards, the media that broadcast them, the families that transmit them despite them. An individual dilemma should never bear the weight of a collective bankruptcy.
Like Baobab, the skin of Aisha is a bark: rough or smooth, dark or clear, it does not say anything about the sap flowing inside. And that's the sap — talent, will, vision — That makes the tree grow. A society that judges its trees with bark will always end up in the shadow of its own mediocrity.
To go further
Politics and Machiavelism in Africa: the roots of deep evil and possible paths of transformation
In a large part of Africa, political life seems to be trapped in a relentless logic where obscure manoeuvres...
Under the mask of beauty: the silent drama of skin whitening in Africa
The hidden face of « Xeesal« In the streets of Dakar, Abidjan or Lagos, the stalls are full of creams promising a...
Between black, mulatto and « Chabin » : The secret history of colour hierarchies in the West Indies
In the West Indies, skin colour remains a social and cultural marker inherited from colonization and slavery. ...
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