VIDEO: Amara La Negra confesses she was told not to date Black men with big noses and lips ‘You wanna have light-skinned babies with good features’
Brown-skinned beauty Amara La Negra has grown in her body and skin-color confidence after being raised on told toxic tales of how lighter skin people would fare better in life than she ever would.
Colorism ran deep in La Negra’s Latino community and those racist attitudes were commonplace for the star of Love & Hip Hop: Miami, reports the Atlanta Black Star. Still Le Negra says she’s told to steer clear of black and Latino men, she told VLAD TV on Sunday.
—Outrage after teacher mocks little Black girl’s hair style on social media—
“One of the things that I get all the time is, ‘Oh my God, you’re so pretty for being a Black girl or you have such great features. Don’t get married to no Black man with a big nose and big lips. They’re gonna mess up your children …’ As if that’s a problem,” she said.
“A lot of Latinos don’t want ‘my kind’ mixed into their family because they wanna ‘better the race,’” she says. “And better the race means more European features.”
Amara La Negra is now comfortable in her skin and has become an outspoken advocate using her black girl magic to further her mission to dismiss stereotypes about Afro-Latinas like herself.
The Dominican beauty who unapologetically rocks a fro’ remembers when she was told to date European men so her kids would be born with straight hair.
“You don’t want any nappy-headed kids,” she said of what she was told. “You want them to have soft, silky hair. So, therefore, no Black husbands or no Black boyfriends. No Black this, no Black that. And it took me a very long time to understand that y’all got a problem. It’s not me, it’s really you.”
Born of a light-skinned mom and a dark-skinned dad, Amara La Negra said her mom’s friends warned her when she was younger to “never” date a Black or Latino man because that’s “worse, it’s awful.”
“You don’t want to have dark-skinned babies,” she explains. “You wanna have light-skinned babies with … ‘good features.’ What exactly does that mean? I don’t know till this day.”
La Negra is busy working on her first album. Her single “Insecure” dropped in March.
