||How do you tell your teenage self to stop drinking those bottles of bleach?||
The lacerations left behind by Dove’s latest racist ad campaign

Slices its way through layers of caramel and chocolate skin.

And apologies may be made,

We did not endeavour hate

But this nation knows all too well of    e  m p t y   apologies to

People of Colour.

‘The diversity of real beauty is core to our beliefs’ 

But this core is only skin deep

This core is the rotten apples laced with poisoned tongues

Words washed away with the same soap used to

Scrub away at our skin.
Have you heard  of ‘Nulla Nulla’ soap

It was ‘Australia’s white hope’ 

Soap scrubbed the black from this nation’s skin

Through ethnic cleansing we’ve killed our kin.

The white dove sneers at us as though we’re pigeons

Claims ‘This is diversity’

When all we feel is adversity

Dove’s corporate cousin Fair and lovely

Stocks supermarket shelves across the globe. 
There is nothing fair in genocide nothing fair in the racial barometer that determines

who is worthy and who is not nothing fair in claims to crack through coconut husk skin to

ooze the white that lies inside nothing fair in the hands that tan in the sun squeezing the

bottles of bleach upon our skin. 
Sun kissed    s e a s   of the Philippines

Cascade every colour under the sun

Yet every billboard on every road

Lacks the magandang morena girl

So I ask you
What the Beckery is this shit? 

How are we so complacent to this?

Leaving the white prints on our face

From those who tried to slap us into place

This skin is not mud splashed on our faces

From the stomping feet of the conquistador

This skin is not yours to fetishise

This skin is not yours to demoralise

We will decolonise and moisturise
This Skin Does Not Come Off
And I am tired of  always being a dark cascade to a sea of twinkling white stars.
But there’s no market for your type your face and words are all the same

I’m sure we did all we could do to try and acknowledge you
Yet somehow,

When Rihanna released 40 shades in her foundation collection

New faces entered Sephora’s reflections

Hoping to get a better inspection

Of colours that matched to our complexion

After years of beauty counter retrospection

Scanning colour palettes with circumspection

Hand and product made no connection

Hearts pumped blood laced with dejection

Of an entire industry’s outright rejection

Of us
It feels like colour correction

When you are shade twenty-one

Instead of the only one

Who wriggles their way

Into whatever shade of tan they have available that day.

It feels like antiseptic for the lacerations that seek to drain

The melanin from our skin. 
It feels like hands     r e  a c  h   i  n  g    out to teenage girls

Pulling the white masks off of their faces

And crying,
My darling,

You are magandang morena,

A beautiful brown skinned girl

You need not drink

Those bottles of bleach

Anymore.