I Was Still Black, but Still a Brown Skin Woman.

"I flinched every single time she said it. I know what she means, but I'm not going to lie." "Even with someone who is as fair as I am, like no one looks at me and thinks that I am at least not a person of color because of my features," Lava says about her own skin tone in the early '90s. She was still considered herself black even into high school. By the time she graduated from college, all of her brown skin was gone, but she still wore brown makeup.