Guest: Francoise Mbabazi
Deriving from her personal perspective of colourism and how she has been impacted by it in the form of oppression, Francoise shares her own personal experience and witnessing in her own family and with various skin shades based on the eyes of society. She delves into how emotional well-being is intertwined into colourism, and the focus and interpretation of beauty and how its perception can tie in with racism, social acceptance, and environmental factors all play a role in the by-product of colourism. Francoise talks about the tremendous negative implications on mental and emotional wellbeing as it relates to research that she has come across. Her perspective is that if one believes they are beautiful then they also show up with confidence, emotional stability, and career success levels tend to be higher. Francoise provides description of how majority of her siblings are lighter skin tones, and there are a few with darker skin tone, and they grew up feeling insecure, not feeling beautiful because she was dark, and didn’t feel she would be able to be successful in life or aspire to any sort of life due to the darkness in her skin tone. Francoise spoke about her young cousin who attempted to wash her skin colour off in the shower by rubbing stone on her skin during her shower, bleeding after her shower in attempts to look lighter skin like the others in the family. Francoise was witness to all these scenarios from the tender age of nine, and colour differential was never something that crossed her mind until these circumstances arose amongst her siblings, which then inspired her to change the world from this young age. She expresses that the stories that heard from a young age plague self-worth and amplifies the biased standards of beauty. Her key message to the listeners is that: colourism is an insidious form of discrimination that favours those of those with a lighter skin tone; when it comes to blackness, colourism takes a dimension of attack on the emotional, mental, social, and professional aspects of a person and leads to low esteem, internalized racism, feelings of unworthiness all leading people to enhance black skin tones; remember that beauty comes from within.
Guest Bio: Francoise is a passionate human rights activist, an international public speaker, and community engagement leader with over 10 years of diverse work experience in the non-profits and philanthropic community. She excels in relationship building, program development, program management, economic empowerment of women and girls with special focus on bridging the gap between community and policy with its social justice values through inclusive, participatory, and collective impact approach.
Francoise is the Co-Founder and President of My Skin Global, where she aims for every brown and black girl to be confident in their skin. She is committed to economic justice, education equity, and poverty reduction and the mental wellbeing of BIPOC youth globally. She has a master’s degree in Gender Studies from Arizona State University, Phoenix AZ and International Business bachelor’s degree from U.S International University, Nairobi, Kenya.
Passionate about: Fundraising for My Skin Global
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