I Was Told I Was Too Black
At the 2017 Speaker Slam® Grand Slam, the Inspirational Speaking Finals held at Lula Lounge in Toronto, Shontelle Dubois took the stage with a five minute story.
Transcript
i'm gonna share bits and pieces of my story with you and my hopes is that for anybody who's watching who has ever experienced discrimination in any form any type of way that my story gives you a little bit of encouragement um to keep moving on and keep persevering and don't allow the words that people try to instill in your head become the product of who you become so growing up i was emotionally and physically abused i grew up in a home where i was the darkest of my siblings and from as young as four i remember being told i was too black i didn't really
understand what that meant um but one specific incident that happened i remember my mom had just finished beating me for an unjustifiable reason she held my head up to the mirror she told me to look at myself and sit and ask me if i see how ugly i look when i cry um she often told me that my gums were too black so when i would smile with people i would hold my mouth like that because i didn't want people to see how ugly i look and how black my gums were not only did i experience racism within the home i went to an elementary
school in the east end and at the time my family was the only black family at that school and i tried to get along with my white um school kids and they would ask to touch my hair and i would think that would be a way to get in closer to them and they would touch my hair and instead they would pull it laugh at me and i just internalize that as i will never be nothing uh i felt like i'll never be loved i'll never be liked i'll never be beautiful i'll never be worthy of looking at growing up into my adult life i
graduated high school and that was the first time that i really felt like i was a somebody and that i could be it as somebody i then went to university and i found out that my credit had been abused completely used and i wouldn't be eligible for osa osap or any financial loans that was a setback that i had to experience i went into every bank doors were closed in my face i therefore had to work three jobs in order to pay my university tuition i got the setback when i i paid my university tuition i managed to get to my third year then i
hit a setback when i became a stereotype which was a single black female pregnant i had my daughter in my fourth year and i still was able to graduate university at that moment i finally felt like everything is coming together the insecurities that i grew up as a child feeling that i'll be a failure and i'll never amount to anything i finally buried that and thought that i'm gonna be somebody for my daughter and i will never let her feel like her black is not ugly and she's not worthy when i graduated university i was working a really good job making great money and then
i got into a car accident i was in a seven car accident i was unconscious at the scene i became a chronic binge binge eater in the process and i decided enough is enough i looked at my daughter i changed my whole life around and i lost 105 pounds in five months it's literally at that moment that i revisited everything from my past and feeling like no one will ever look at me feeling like i will never be nothing feeling like because i'm black i will never succeed in life i'm feeling like i will never be able to stand up against anybody else in my
field i decided to let all that go and go full force into the goals i had set for myself i wanted to become a personal trainer but i had no place to train i decided to train in my apartment stairwells at jen and french training in the stairwells at first was very embarrassing um my pride was shot i was made fun of i experienced lots of racial slurs and a lot of people made fun of me online and i remember feeling like that four-year-old kid once again just feeling like a failure but this time my daughter was watching me i managed to post and promote
my services i played like crazy and i got my first plane in the stairs uh for some reason the sound is acting up so it's so good so good uh it's better than before uh but uh it could be better and my products are doing really well and my story i hope if anybody's watching who experiences any racism discrimination for anything that it is you're going through i was told i was ugly and i was too black by my own mom and my peers outside of that and what i decided to do was to take off every single dart that people were throwing at me
left right and center i took off all the darts i broke it in half and i said no i am going to be what i want to be and now thank you so much you
Transcript generated from the recording and shown as captured, without added punctuation. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.