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Scroll.in ·For the curious

‘I Wrote a Children’s Book About an Insult I Faced. Later, I Had the Same Thought About My Daughter’

by Lakshmi Iyer

Published 2026-10-17 08:00:00+00:00

How do you unlearn a prejudice against your own skin when your family calls it care?

0:00 / 9:51 · Narrator Sulafat

Context

In a Scroll.in essay published on 17 October 2026, an author catches herself passing down the exact judgment about skin color that haunted her own childhood. The story captures how prejudice operates inside families, often disguised as care or casual observation over breakfast. It asks a difficult question about inherited habits. How do parents and grandparents end up enforcing the very physical standards that caused them pain? The result is a quiet look at generational baggage, and what it actually takes to put it down.

Show notes

An account of how colorism operates within South Asian families, moving from the author's childhood memories of skin-lightening rituals to her experiences raising a brown daughter in the United States. The essay examines how relatives disguise prejudice as care, and explains the author's decision to write a children's book that gives young readers the vocabulary to name the discrimination they face at home.

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