“Black is Beautiful” Workshop 2016 Outline

As a team and students of color living in a community that skin bleaching is so common, we decide to have a workshop that will focus on the danger of skin bleaching and celebrating our natural skin color; celebrating melanin. This workshop, “Black is Beautiful” is a continuation of a workshop that previous Lagim Tehi Tuma fellows held in collaboration with Ibrahim Alhassan, who was a mentor and is a teacher at Dalun Junior High School.

For the workshop we decided to create a questionnaire that will address skin bleaching, touch on the youth and other community members knowledge and understanding of skin bleaching, the dangerous side effects and why it is important to accept and celebrate their natural skin color.

On Friday July 22, 2016 we visited the Dalun Chief to inform him of the workshop and to record his part of the video we used at the workshop the following Friday. We asked him to relay an inspirational message to the youth addressing why he thinks skin bleaching is bad, why the youth should not skin bleach and why he believes black is beautiful. Following our visit to the chief, we visited Dalun Junior High School. At the junior high school, we had an informal talk with students to hint at what we will be doing at the workshop. We asked the students questions from the questionnaire and recorded some of the response. We also provided the teachers a copy of the questionnaire and collected their response.
On Friday Saturday July 23, 2016 we traveled to Tamale and with the help of Hopin Academy and Maccarthy Mac-Gbathy, we were able to interview young men and women who were also students at the University of Developmental Studies for the video. They later on agreed to be apart of our panel at the workshop.