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CurlyNikki.com: I’m Black, Do I Need to Wear a Suscreen?

I’m going to be completely honest with you. I just started actively wearing sunscreen a little over two years ago. I didn’t think it was a big deal to go out of the house without protection against the sun’s rays. Women in my family always said “black don’t crack”, so I assumed, like many of my brown-skinned OBV’s that I was naturally protected from the sun with the added benefit of always looking at least ten years younger than my actual age.

It wasn’t until I read this article on blacks and skin cancer that I got a rude awakening about the reality of how our “black don’t crack” adage is clearly causing us to danger ourselves with exposure to the sun. So now, because when we know better we do better, I do my best to lather up my sunscreen before greeting the day.

Before you go and run to grab that sunscreen understand that not all sunscreens are created equal. In fact, typical sunscreens are full of potential cancer-causing ingredients like Oxybenzone, which can cause leucocytosis, anemia, and can reduce organ weight and Para-Aminoabenzoic Acid (PABA), a known carcinogenic. The Environmental Working group did a study revealing that 84% of sunscreens are actually harmful to human health.

Protect yourself by using a physical sunscreen versus a chemical sunscreen. Check out the video review I did last summer talking about my favorite sunscreen.

For other options, check out this great list from the Environmental Working Group for finding the best and safest sunscreens.

If you aren’t sure about what’s in your sunscreen check to see how it rates on the Cosmetics Database. Keep your beautiful brown skin protected and your health as well.

Sherrell Dorsey is a natural beauty expert, writer, speaker and advocate of health, wellness and sustainability in communities of color.

(Source: curlynikki.com)

IF I HAVE UNFOLLOWED YOU, IT IS IN NO WAY AN INDICATOR OF MY ESTEEM.

ILU BRILLIANT AND BEAUTIFUL PEOPELS

I just have to streamline my dash to adoptee-focused content for the aforementioned hard mofo class Bastard broadcast

will most likely follow back sharpish or at least til I get some med results back feel free to send happy vibes plz & tnx in advance xx

Beauty and terror, our constant companions.

Must be an odd phase, cuz for some reason juggling a full work schedule and the logistics of living in yet another country all the while confronting a potentially life-threatening medical condition (always super duper fun when one is an orphan with no available family/medical history whatsoever, right?!) is actually giving me increased bursts of energy and I’ve found the time and inclination to

• go HAM with my adoption posts and reveal more about surviving foster care and federally subsidized, eugenics-derived programs that torture and murder disabled and neurodiverse adoptees of color in particular, experiences which I’ve heretofore kept mum if only cuz white ppl in their entitlement essentially demand that I slap & spoonfeed them rather than actually post important and rare firsthand accounts for the public benefit
  
  
• start beauty blogging and posting some DIY home remedies that have literally saved me thousands in health/self-care expenses :D

I see no conflict of interest between these whatsoever and neither should you. X

A Peace of my mind: Respect my agency 2012!

[…] There is no easy way of saying what I feel right now, except a deep hurt and gnawing urgency to bang my head against my desk as a prescriptive to make the dumb-assery stop. 

Sure, Joseph Kony and his counterpart of yesteryear, Idi Amin, have largely been responsible for the single story of Uganda. I have a hard time shaking it from the lips of strangers I meet.

That’s all they know or seem to want to listen to. They dismissively glaze over my breathless exultations of the great promise in our youth, our technology, our agriculture, and our women.

“Sooo, Idi Amin, huh? That was terrible. Is he still alive?”

It is a slap in the face to so many of us who want to rise from the ashes of our tumultuous past and the noose of benevolent, paternalistic, aid-driven development memes. We, Africans, are sandwiched between our historically factual imperfections and well-intentioned, road-to-hell-building-do-gooders. It is a suffocating state of existence. To be properly heard, we must ride the coattails of self-righteous idiocy train. Even then, we have to fight for our voices to be respected.

The latest IC fund-raising cum “awareness-raising” is an insult to my identity and my intellectual capacity to reasonably defend its existence as beneficial to any Ugandan. The video project is so devoid of nuance, utility and respect for agency that it is appallingly hard to contextualize. I won’t even try.

This IC campaign is a perfect example of how fund-sucking NGO’s survive. “Raising awareness” (as vapid an exercise as it is) on the level that IC does, costs money. Loads and loads of money.

Someone has to pay for the executive staff, fancy offices, and well, that 30-minute grand-savior, self-crowning exercise in ego stroking—in HD—wasn’t free. In all this kerfuffle, I am afraid everyone is missing the true aim of IC’s brilliant marketing strategy.

They are not selling justice, democracy, or restoration of anyone’s dignity. This is a self-aware machine that must continually find a reason to be relevant. They are, in actuality, selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African.

All I have to do is show up in my broken English, look pathetic and wanting. You, my dear social media savvy click-activist, will shed a tear, exhaust Facebook’s like button, mobilize your cadre of equally ill-uninformed netizens to throw money at the problem.

Cause, you know, that works so well in the first world.

I would love nothing more than to be telling you the small victories we experience working with the very scarred survivors of Kony’s atrocities. The Women of Kireka are the most resilient group of individuals that I know. Spend a day with them and you will wonder how they manage to so calmly describe to you watching their entire families burned alive, their husbands and children hacked to death, in front of them. They do it so calmly, methodically, with such articulate prose that it leaves your soul victimized for it’s privilege. Yet they don’t pause from rolling a perfectly crafted paper bead for a beautiful necklace. They don’t waste their time lamenting the lack of justice for the fallen or the abducted. Why? Because it doesn’t bring back the dead, it doesn’t dissolve the horrific images of their huts burning, or ease the scars borne of running scared into the night.

Instead, they want work and respect and business to be able to make decisions that move their lives along. They want desperately to forget and rebuild anew; thankful for their lives. They want radios and cell phones and grasp at any semblance of normalcy. They cuddle and nurse their newborns like delicate, cherished gifts. What they don’t talk about is justice. They talk about how to forgive and move on.

But I can’t tell you their story. Why? Someone else has taken over their part in this complex saga, simplified it, branded it, packaged it and is reselling it as an Action Kit[…]

The academics have weighed in on this debate here, and here, and here and will continue to do elsewhere in the coming days. The click-activists, denied context and nuance, have spewed their ignorance all over the comments section in self-righteous indignation for all the world to see. They have whipped out their wallets and bought their very own Super Hero activist action kits. They have bombarded their friend’s Facebook wall with ignominious updates[…]

Evil is something that is easy to point out from afar. But if we conclude that any one individual/organization/group has the right to hijack the voice of so many in the name of good, then I have a common sense pill to sell you.

[…]

I am coherent enough to realize when someone is trying to genuinely do good. At the surface, there’s nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with assuming that the people who you are trying to help 1) need help, 2) want your help, or 3) can’t help themselves. IC and this video assumes all the above.

Before anyone says ‘why haven’t you done anything to stop Kony?’, may I point out that it took the world’s most sophisticated army over a decade and billions of dollars to catch Osama bin Laden. Kony has been on the run for 25+ years. On a continent 3 times the size of America. Catching & stopping him is not a priority of immediate concern.

You know what is? Finding a bed net so that millions of kids don’t die every day from malaria. How many of you know that more Ugandans died in road accidents last year (2838) than have died in the past 3 years from LRA attacks in whole of central Africa(2400)? We’ve picked our battles and we chose to simply try to live. And the world should be helping us live on our own terms, by respecting our agency to choose which battles to put capacity towards.

Bolded mine.

Read the entire article at Project Diaspora by TMS Ruge. Seriously, read it.