True emancipation is to love one's identity

THE EDITOR, Sir:

Why are the descendants of our Emancipation bleaching their skins till they look like rolling-calf duppies? Why has this set, born after 1962, enslaved themselves to drugs and numbed their senses with 'grabba' and brain-crippling energy drinks?

Why are these descendants so dissatisfied with the way they look that they not only try to bleach white, but they wear wigs sewn on to their short, plaited hair or glued to their scalp? Some will not attend their graduation if they don't look like Pocahontas, the American Indian maiden with hair reaching her bottom.

Some post-Emancipation products don't believe in old-fashioned work, are experts in scamming, know how to beat the governing systems, get guns from the rich men, and murder emancipated people. They are so insecure, they buy their way to nearly everything and kill more people as they speed, without feeling or thought, on poorly built roads?

Historians and teachers write and talk about Emancipation and how the white owners mated with black women and produced mulattos, quadroons, octoroons and 'wee-bit of black'. When the child was born, if he looked white, he was taken out of the barracks and raised in the great house. He was privileged and even sent abroad to be educated. But that was such a long time ago.

In this great age of technology, people are still being measured and selected because of colour and shades of near white, and 'pretty' hair and 'good-looking' fine features with straight noses. It was frowned on in the 1930s, '40s and '50s when our brightest black sons returned with university degrees and white wives. Few of them married beautiful, jet-black girls.

My generation was proud to be black and we sang 'Young, Gifted and Black' with great pride. Success needs no bleach.

We have to teach the new generation to be proud as their forefathers were.

VERONICA BLAKE CARNEGIE