“The message I have for my sisters is that how you look doesn’t matter as long as you feel beautiful inside.”
On Instagram, Khoudia Diop appears confident and is smiling in the majority of her pictures. Her 300,000 (and growing) followers are positive and supportive and even her handle melaniin.goddess evidences a woman who knows that she is gorgeous. However, the 19-year-old has experienced a great deal of bullying and racism for her very dark skin.
“I was teased a lot growing up, because of my skin tone. By other kids, and now even online sometimes, people will make comments. Growing up, I faced it by confronting the bullies. As I grew, I learned to love myself more every day, and not pay attention to the negative people, which helped a lot.”
Now the Sengalese-born New Yorker is encouraging girls to embrace themselves, “not pay attention” to the haters and she focuses on learning to “love myself more every day”. She is embracing the darkness that they bullied her about, even posting a photo of her skin alone, highlighting it’s flawlessness.
😍😍😍😍Only ppl who get close to me know 🍫🍫 #drippingchocolate
A photo posted by Khoudia diop (@melaniin.goddess) on
The model’s message of positivity is catching as she becomes more popular, and she is loud and clear about her message: “One of my goals is to make all my dark-skinned sisters out there laugh at those with their “beauty standards” they’re nobody noooobody to tell you how you should look. Start glowing queen. [sic]”
Along with self-love, and standing up to bullying, Khoudia is calling for more people of colour on catwalks and “more women of colour in fashion, period.”
Her management, The Colored Girl Inc, has also praised her, saying her fame came quickly, over just a couple weeks and she had less than 100 Instagram followers. “She’s a rare beauty that we had to have in our campaign. In less than a month she now has almost 100k followers.”
A photo posted by Khoudia diop (@melaniin.goddess) on
Even as Khoudia is new to fame she has already figured out how to harness her haters’ taunts into mantras, quoted as saying “They nicknamed me darky, daughter of the night”. Jokes on the haters as it looks like Khoudia is getting the last laugh, as well as a great platform to fight bullying and racism.
Meet the girl herself in the below video…
