Peloton instructor and a global Nike athlete,Tunde Oyeneyin has opened up about a painful childhood experience with colourism, revealing that a cruel comment about her dark skin once made her consider changing her complexion.
Speaking on the Making Space with Hoda Kotb podcast, Oyeneyin recalled being in fifth or sixth grade when a boy’s friend told her that the boy thought she was pretty but would never date her because her skin was “so dark.”
She said the comment deeply affected her because the boy himself was the same complexion as her. “I think that was probably maybe halfway through the school day, and I remember the whole day knowing that I needed to release and cry,” she recalled.
Although she refused to cry in front of her classmates, Oyeneyin said she broke down immediately after getting home. She then asked her brother how she could make her skin lighter.
According to her, her brother suggested ble@ch, apparently without understanding the seriousness of what she was asking. Oyeneyin said she subsequently filled a bathtub with boiling hot water, poured in a gallon of ble@ch and prepared to submerge herself in it.
“I said, ‘Let me just test my hand to make sure this is worth it.’ So I put my hand in for about 15 minutes to boiling bleach water, and I pulled my hand out and nothing happened,” she recounted.
Looking back, Oyeneyin said she often thinks about what could have happened if she had gone through with the plan.
“I think about that moment all the time, and, like, the damage that I would have done to myself had I fully gone through with it,” she said.
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