albino black person - Kenosha Robinson - people with albinism - Marie Claire

The twist of fate in another state of mind..across the waters..AMERICA THE beautiful albinism right here...the same thang..but she's got family..it gets worse...LISTEN!!!!!! albino black person - Kenosha Robinson - people with albinism - Marie Claire: "Growing up in Jackson, MS, I gravitated toward white people. It felt natural, I suppose, because I looked like them. While my cousins got black baby dolls for Christmas, mine were always peaches and cream. Once, during playtime in elementary school, one of the black girls told me I couldn't join her group. My doll, she said, was the wrong color. Later, I understood what she meant was that I was the wrong color. Like my doll, I was blonde and green-eyed-the only one in a mass of brown skin. I am African-American, born with a genetic abnormality called albinism, meaning I've got little to no pigment in my skin. Albinism is a recessive trait, so both parents must carry the gene in order to conceive a child with it. It's more common than you'd think-one in 17,000 children is born with albinism. My mom was only 16 when I was born. She did her best to protect me, but I knew early on that I was different. Everywhere we went-the mall, the grocery store-people stared at me. You could see the question on their faces: 'Is she really yours?' My dad died from pneumonia when I was 7. Mostly what I remember about him is the way he stood up for me. One day I asked him, 'Why do people always look at me?' He said, 'It's because you're so beautiful.' But some of my extended family were less charitable. Most of my relatives are from the Mississippi Delta, where blacks and whites still live separately. The notion of forming a friendship with a white person is foreign to my relatives, so how were they supposed to treat me? The only way, it seemed, was by singling me out and teasing me. 'White girl!' they'd call me. I felt like I was a betrayal"