Alice Walker wrote a book called In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens and within it there was a poem called “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?”. Walker spoke about colourism and referred to it as a “prejudicial treatment of people of the same race based solely on the colour of their skin”. She refers to two women within the poem: one as the ‘Black Black woman”, and the other as the “high yellow black woman". She emphasises the hate that the “Black Black woman" endures and states that the “high yellow” woman is aware of the pain they unintentionally inflict on the “black black woman”.
'Slay in Your Lane' is a self-help that I originally read before even thinking about my advanced project. The book really, taught me things I didn’t even know about the black community myself and also gave me an eye-opening experience to something I always denied myself as a black woman myself. It is about growing up as a young black woman. Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené wrote this book as a guide to help black women through the 21st century. It features interviews with some of Britain's most successful black women, shares their experiences and celebrates their achievements (Adegoke & Uviebinené,2018). Uviebinené spoke in an interview with the Guardian about the fact that she had read a huge range of self-help books growing up like 'Lean In', she expressed that these books were written by white women and were great but she couldn’t relate to them personally, so she wrote the book as an aim to let young black girls know that there is someone who relates to them that has achieved a successful career, and also to offer black teenagers and women the kind of advice she would have liked to have received growing up, to help navigate her way to a bigger, freer life - something I am trying to incorporate into my advanced project.