Earlier this year, Kim Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner all gave birth to daughters within just a few months of one another. Over the weekend, Kim shared the first-ever (objectively adorable) photograph of all three little girls together, which she captioned “the triplets.”
It should by now come as no surprise that a certain portion of Kim’s 117 million followers are vile humans. Within minutes, racist and abusive comments about the children began to flow in. True Thompson—the daughter of Khloé Kardashian and Cleveland Cavaliers’ Tristan Thompson—was particularly singled out due solely to the darker shade of her skin in comparison with her cousins.
Besides calling True “too dark,” several Instagram users also called the 5-month-old “not cute,” “ugly,” and accused her of looking too much like a boy.
Luckily, there were far, far more people who came to the babies’ defense, pointing out how weird, insecure, and truly horrid a person must be to hate on a 5-month-old BABY.
Many were disappointed and dismayed that in a supposedly en-wokened 2018, trolls are projecting their colorist ideals on literal babies. How skin color continues to serve as the primary criterion in determining how a person—in this case, I reiterate, A BABY—is judged and evaluated.
The phrasing of “a nice mix” is an ingrained example of the type of privileging of light skin over dark that defines colorism.
This must have been what Drake was talking about when he sang, “I wasn’t hiding my kid from the world/ I was hiding the world from my kid/ From empty souls who just wake up and looked to debate.”
Do better.
