Last year Tumblr user FullTen, the child of an interracial couple, shared honest thoughts about how her lightness and her mother’s whiteness have been objectified and fetishized over the years. Her essay has been re-blogged hundreds of times, as people reflect on her words and share their own experiences.

“As a product of a black man chasing after white women, it makes me super uncomfortable when black men reblog my photos and I go to their page and it’s nothing but either, white girls or lite brites. Like, my dad dated nothing but white women, and my mother seemed to gravitate towards this type of black man, who would get a ton of arbitrary african statues from pier 1, listen to nothing but jazz, only buy from black artists, and yet, seemed to exclusively go for white women. I’ve heard my step father at the time say he loved her pale skin, and that he didn’t even know she was spanish, he just saw white. These men foolishly gravitate towards whiteness like a moth to a low watt light bulb in the dark. My father and step father used the whiteness of my mother and the women they dated as a status symbol. It was common for my father to say ‘I got a big house, a corvette, and a hot wife,’ she was tall, white, and blonde, and she hated when he said that. She hated when he listed her among his possessions. He used her as ‘proof’ of his success at the time. That if anyone looked at his life, they would see a successful black man, and a white wife solidified that. I hate it, because this mentality comes at the price of dark skinned black women, and women who are proud of their blackness. It seems like something they need to stomp out. I dated a lot of black men who fetishized my light skin, and hated dark skin and anything that was linked to blackness in women, they tied it in with failure, ugliness, poverty… So many comments about my afro and hair, they wanted straight hair, I had to adhere to the european ideal of beauty as best as I could.”