Black women are going to bombard your timelines with #BombBlackHijabis today

A few hours from now, Black Muslim women will take to the internet, post selfies and share stories of being sidelined - for being black, for being Muslim.

They will use hashtags such as #BombBlackHijabis and #BombBlackMuslimahs to reclaim their pride, the narrative.

Because it is important for brown-skinned and black women to see themselves as beautiful. Because it is important to share their stories, their pain.

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The timelines are buzzing with reminders.

And it's not just black women who are participating. "The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice", reads a tweet by Fauzia, a brown-skinned woman, asking women to reclaim their narrative.

"I look cross eyed but you should watch anyway," tweeted Safura Salam, who started the hashtag movement along with Mikel Aki'lah.

In a piece on Muslimgirl.net, Salam writes, "When I decided to get involved, my first thought was of my daughter; a lively dark-skinned girl with an infectious laugh and an insatiable appetite. I thought about the year she started school and how much I agonised over making the right choices for her."

She didn't enrol her daughter in an Islamic school, but in a school with a majority of black students and teachers. Not because there were too few of them, but because she didn't want her daughter to be a recipient of racist slurs.

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She decided to send her 'dark-skinned' daughter to a normal school. Where little boys didn't tell her that she wasn't pretty. She wanted to delay that first moment of overt racism.

"I didn't want her to struggle in finding a place within the tapestry of our Ummah. An Ummah where South Asian, Arab, and - to a lesser extent - Persian expressions of Islam pass for orthodoxy, but her own cultural and historical roots are often ignored," she wrote.

This isn't the first time that a hashtag is being used to highlight racism. Hashtags such as #UnfairAndLovely and #BlackinMSA have been used earlier to draw attention to racism that is still a real problem in most communities.

Fair-skinned women have been chosen over the dark. Dark women have been humiliated. Their marriages have fallen apart. Even though Black women have always been a part of Islam.

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"I want the millions of women who had to endure glib remarks about 'preferring' fair skin to drop kick the small minded haters who said it with a stunning selfie...I want to celebrate you, the originator of Muslim swag, an innovator of Muslim expression, #BombBlackHijabis and #BombBlackMuslimahs."

The black beauties are going to get dressed, take selfies and bomb your timelines with #BombBlackHijabis. Are you ready?

Edited by Payal Puri

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