Juliet Ibrahim has stated that, contrary to popular belief, light-skinned celebrities or thespians have the upper hand and are more favored, the opposite is true.
“Juliet Ibrahim claims that they are frequently stereotyped as a result of their skin color and that they spend the majority of their time in detention centers. In a recent interview with a famous media personality and lawyer Chude Jideonwo, she revealed this.
“Everybody has a perception that light-skinned people have it all, but funny enough, we’re just like everybody else. We’re human beings just like everyone else.
“And for me growing up, I suffered a lot. Self-esteem issues and my skin color were one of those things. Because everybody thought I was favored, that I didn’t deserve whatever I got when I got it. But I was an A-class student.
“I would be competing with the best in class. If somebody is taking A today, I’m behind them. Valedictorian, I’m the next person. But it’s because I knew I had to learn to be able to pass. I wanted to grow up to be a superstar and my parents told me I have to pass to be able to be the superstar I wanted to be.
“So I needed to pass, so I would be studying, I’d be doing everything. It wasn’t because of the looks that I’d be in the drama class, or take first in class, or even in the whole school, I came in second when I was graduating from high school.
“So it’s just not about that and it has come a long way. It has taken a toll on me over the years, and people feel I got to where I am today because of my color or my looks.
“Another thing is that we suffer a lot. As for me, as an actress, we suffer to get movie roles because sometimes there are just too many actors that are light-skinned to pair up as parents. How many light-skinned older men are there to play the father role?
“So sometimes I’ve lost out on movie roles because of that, because they’ll say, “Ah, we have to use someone that is dark-skinned because we feel like the pairing up won’t work, the casting won’t make sense.”
“There are lighter-skinned older actresses in Nigeria who have helped me a lot. So sometimes, they’ll just pair somebody like Ngozi Ezeonu as my mother.
“But it really is a lot because even with the casting in movies, they want to cast you, light-skin woman, as the home-breaker and husband snatcher, so there’s this narrative they put in the minds of people that are watching films, and I feel like that’s why we get misjudged with that light skin thing in Africa.
SOURCE: www.ghnewslive.com
