Guest Blog: Loving the Skin I'm Born in by Kaypri

This Guest Blog is by KAYPRI, who appears Saturday at The Silver Lake Female Festival

Stories telling the experiences of non-whites rarely get told in Hollywood. The Oscars, as political as they may be, are a good barometer. The black community gets one a year while others get some, or none, at all.  One year black people had Dreamgirls, the next it was Precious, and, most recently, The Help, which only told the easy parts of the story of what black domestics in this country went through. Not even counting black stories, where are the Latino, Asian, and American Indian stories?

When I grew up, Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels were the women I admired. I didn’t have a black woman to look up to. Florida Evans? Louise Jefferson? Nell on Gimmie a Break!  Young black children still choose the white (good) doll over the black (bad) doll and I’ve worked in enough classrooms to see that the self hatred in communities of color has gone nowhere. I was a victim of it myself and it took me a good long time to love the skin I was born in.

In the meantime we storytellers of color are forced to go independent and we keep writing and shooting our films believing that as Sam Cooke sang, A Change Is Gonna Come,  and we will apply Sam’s lyrics to Trayvon Martin's situation, as well about healing the hearts of those who expressed their outrage about how the casting of non-whites ruined their idea of what the teenage fantasy Hunger Games should have looked like. 

Kaypri is performing her autobiographical one-woman play, Babygirl the coming of age sitcom/drama of a media-codependa-lova-holic at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Lyric-Hyperion Theatre and Café.

Babygirl is part of Silver Lake’s Female Festival and is appropriate for ages 8 and up.  

$10 Advance tickets are available online at www.lyrichyperion.com ($15 at the door).