For the most part, it’s good advice to tell people to follow their dreams. In our darker moments, a lot of dreams can seem impossible to attain and some helpful encouragement from someone who knows what we’re capable of can make the difference between achieving it and abandoning it.
But, as sad as it is to say, it can be outright irresponsible to encourage people towards certain dreams. For instance, if someone dreamed of being a breatharian who only subsists on air and sunlight, encouraging them is, as The Guardian reported, the same as sentencing them to die of dehydration and starvation.
Although what we’re talking about today isn’t so obviously lethal as that, it still involves the use of dangerous substances for questionable reasons.
Three years ago, Martina Big was a blonde, aspiring model from Germany.
Although she told the British TV show This Morning that she liked her “natural blonde beauty,” she also said she admired the looks of black women enough that she wanted to become one herself.
And so, two years ago, she got into contact with someone who offered injections of a synthetic hormone called Melanotan to darken her skin.
She received three injections of the drug, which she said not only affected her skin, but also changed her eye color and made her hair grow in curlier and darker.
She also underwent a series of surgeries, including one to make her lips fuller, but her attempt to change into a black woman wasn’t entirely cosmetic.
She said she was invited to Kenya to learn about African history and culture and lived there for several weeks.
While there, she filmed a video she later posted to YouTube in which she was baptized with the name Malaika Kubwa (Swahili for “Big Angel”).
She believes this experience is what confirmed her transformation into “a real African woman.”
While she went through all of these changes, she married a man named Michael who wants to transform in the same way she does.
As Martina told This Morning, they had the same number of Melanotan injections at around the same time, but they apparently affected her body more than his.
Although her story as a whole is controversial, one statement she made caused a particular ripple across social media.
Namely, she said that her doctor told her that if her and Michael do have a child, that child will also share her dark skin.
Host Holly Willoughby asked how that was genetically possible and whether Martina would still feel connected to them if they were born white.
To that, Martina said, “It’s a mix of Michael and me. I’m pretty sure it will be black or milk chocolate or a little bit light, it doesn’t matter.”
Like Willoughby, Twitter users seemed to dispute that her baby will naturally have the same melanin in their skin as Martina had injected into her.
Moreover, that description of the baby as potentially “milk chocolate” did little to win people over to her argument that she is now an African woman.
What doesn’t help is that the doctor who apparently told Martina this would happen wasn’t named, so it’s hard to determine if they actually said her child would be black.
In fact, there are a lot of unanswered questions that are important to determining that doctor’s credibility.
For instance, did they know that she and Michael darkened their skin with a substance that is not approved by the FDA in both the U.S. and illegal in the U.K. because it has never been safety tested?
The issue at hand with Martina Big identifying or imitating blackness is these people are benefiting from a culture that they have never shared the experiences or inequalities of.