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Do Not Call This Woman Dark Skinned

It Is Time For Our Language To Evolve For Black Women The Way It Has For Many Others

David Saint Vincent
8 min readJan 23, 2025
Deborah Ayorinde, Official London Theater ©

Regardless of your sexual preference or the beauty aesthetic you bend toward, the woman captured in this picture is very likely to make you feel something good on sight. Even the most stoic human being has emotional reflexes popping and pinging around inside of them constantly, whether or not they demonstrate those emotions to others. And it is a pretty safe bet that when human eyes land on this woman, the natural responses she evokes are anything but negative.

The intensity of the emotions will certainly vary by the beholder, but a rejection reflex is off the table, barring some level of mental impairment. Why then, are we always calling this woman and women who look like her, ugly? Evidently we are all laboring under some level of mental impairment.

As humans have evolved, we have built up so many political and social filters between our eyes and our minds that by the time we generate an audible response to a visual stimulus, it has been well calibrated for social acceptability. That is the only way to explain how we can ever assign an ugly label like “dark” to a woman that looks like this. It is our social custom to call her that. And it is time for that custom to change.

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David Saint Vincent
David Saint Vincent

Written by David Saint Vincent

I write what I like. I hope you like it, too.

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