Everyone believes in white

You are so right, Guatemala is so beautiful, the people and the country itself are so generous and so hospitable, they embrace one with so much warmth, etc. etc. that it is a miracle.  Yes, I noticed this belief in white superiority long ago.  The mother of a childhood friend, a neighbor, told me that her mother was Indian and her father Negro (her names for them);  she was the only one of the children to take after her father and her siblings looked down on her and rejected her as 'black'.   But then later in graduate school we had agood friend from Nigeria who was almost black (he played soccer with my husband and his legs were the most beautiful I have seen to date: like an old bronze statue outdoors)  I feel sure he had never imagined that anyone was superior to him;  there was no assumed superiority either.  I asked him once if he felt superior to others.  He replied that he was a chief's son and had known all his life that he was superior, not better, he said, but superior, yes.  It warms me to think about him, long dead.  If, as I believe, we owe to our mothers' lighter color our feelings that lighter is more beautiful, there is no way we are going to remove that from our selves.  It is, by now, a fact of human life.  When I encounter that feeling directed at me, all my being says, "but not better, not better".  As you can see in my latest blog entry, my ugly coloring has helped me hold on to that thought.  I should say "used to help me", because I no longer need it.  No one can put me down; no one can lift me up.  I still put myself down some.....

Si nos tratamos de vos ¿me puede corregir?  Lo oigo todos los dïas, pero nunca tuve a quien hablarlo. 

I didn't respond to all you say, but I will another day.  

                                                           Mary Belle