Alzayda with her children on her 80th Birthday

WOMAN WITHOUT A RACE 

I am sure you have heard of the man without a country now let me introduce you to women without a race. My name is Alzayda E Smith and I am a victim of Vitiligo a skin disease that causes you to lose your pigmentation that causes white spots to appear on your face and body. It does not cause physical pain since its cosmetic but the psychological pain is untold.

I was five years old when my spots started to appear on my legs and all the period of my school years from kindergarten to high school I was the brunt of teasing and torment from my fellow students. I was called polka dotty, two tone, zebra and many more mean and degrading names. When I was in junior high a boy refused to sit next to me because he said I had leprosy. Looking different in my young adult years and being constantly shunned caused me at the age of nineteen to try to commit suicide I felt unattractive and insecure. And like an outcast.

I was fortunate to meet and marry a wonderful man who saw me and not just my outer mottled skin and with his help I learned to cope with the changes and stopped hiding behind high necked and long sleeve clothes. As my children came it seemed to hasten the progress of the Vitiligo and by my late thirties I was whiter than the driven snow.

Now I was confronted with another problem I was too white to be black and too black to be white. My husband and I were often insulted because we were perceived as an inter- racial couple and in my era it was frowned upon. My children went through most of their lives being asked .is that your mother or is your mother white. Or are you adopted and now my grand children have experienced the same kind of questions. And my great-grandchildren have been asked is that really your grandma.

Because I am black I felt I belonged in a black church but there was always a chill and many times I was asked why I didn't attend a church of my own race. When I would say I am where I belong they would not believe me. I have been discriminated against by my own race so many times in so many ways. I was president of a local chapter of The National Council Of Negro Women in Houston and we were invited to a local television station to speak of our aims, while being interviewed the station flashed sub titles of our positions on the screen they made me the secretary and made the darkest woman there the president even they thought I was to white to head a black organization. My whole life has been trying to prove myself as a black to my race it hasn't worked. I am not believed as a black woman to the white race either. I showed a co worker a picture of my husband and she remarked, "Oh you're married to a black man", I replied I am black also her answer to me was, just because you're a communist you don't have to make believe you're black, how about the irony of that. I could go on forever if I tried to recount all my experiences they would fill a book.

This disease has made me a person without a race, I have Indian blood on my father's side and even they refuse to believe that I could be related. Vitiligo does not only rob you of your self-esteem and cause depression it changes your life drastically. I am now in the twilight of my life, I just celebrated my eighty-first birthday and all these years I have been discriminated against. When do I get my civil rights?

I am donating my body to science in the hope that the medical world can find the cause of Vitiligo and perhaps help find a cure.

Alzayda Smith

 

Back To Vitiligo Voices