Iomikoe Johnson was 25 years old when she noticed two pea-sized white spots on her skin.
She lived in Texas, was a Black woman, and didn’t understand what was happening to her. She thought it was cancer. The doctors gave her a different diagnosis: vitiligo, an incurable disease that would gradually depigment her body. Today, at 46, more than 70% of her skin is white. But the journey toward accepting it nearly destroyed her as she watched the color she had lived with all her life disappear without explanation.
The most painful thing didn’t come from strangers, although there are those too: people who stare at her in the street, trolls who compare her to a cow or a Dalmatian. What weighs on her most are the comments from her own Black community, which accuses her of intentionally bleaching her skin. “As Black people, they should know what it feels like to be discriminated against”, she responds. Today she models and repeats something she learned the hard way: no one else in the world looks like her.
