When former Love Islander Chyna Mills welcomed her now 17-month old, Havana, she knew parenthood would come with its challenges. A lack of sleep, constant noise and emotional turbulence are some of the well-known hurdles of welcoming a newborn. What she didn't expect was the additional exhaustion of dealing with strangers incessantly questioning her daughter's skin tone on social media.
'It pretty much started from the moment she was introduced to the world,' Mills tells Grazia. People she didn't know, strangers who followed her, left comments on photos of her young baby, saying things like, 'How can that even be your child?' and 'Why is she so white? Why is she so pale?'. One user even wrote, 'I hope your ancestors curse your womb'.
Mills says it was 'massive shock to the system', and at first she kept the situation to herself. Friends had shared lots about their own experiences of being a parent, but she'd never heard any of them say they'd been questioned on their children's skin colour. She started to remove the comments, but quickly was trapped into a pattern of continuously monitoring, removing comments and then filtering out words. On top of the overwhelm that comes with being a new mother, she was now a full-time moderator of her Instagram and TikTok page.
'I didn't control what colour my baby came out. I'm blessed that she came out however she is – I don't care if she was black, blue, brown, purple. I didn't think it could ever be a topic of what colour she would be when she was born. I thought it was just going to be, "oh, your baby's beautiful", or "she's lovely", and "welcome into the world, Havana", rather than, "alright, you've had a baby that's so pale compared to you. Is she even yours?".'
The impact was huge. On top of navigating her new role as a parent, she began to reduce herself in response and cut herself off from the internet – a huge part of her job as an online creator. 'I just stopped reading anyone's comments. I stopped opening anyone's messages. I stopped engaging with any of my followers or anything online,' she shares. When she came across a negative comment about Havana it sent her 'into a state'.
Husband Neil Jones, a dancer and choreographer on Strictly Come Dancing, told her to ignore the comments, but she couldn't. It felt like strangers were attacking her baby.
The bad comments always stick with you more.
'It gets to the point where you can't ignore the comments because you're reading them all the time, and the bad comments always stick with you more than the however many lovely comments that you get,' she says. She realised she had to speak out. She posted on Instagram, 'I find this highly disrespectful for anyone to comment on anyone's skin colour, let alone my baby's. Keep your comments to yourself and stay away from my page.'
After, a lot of people thanked her for speaking about the experience. 'Many of them didn't feel comfortable speaking about their own', she says. 'I didn't want anyone else to have the same experience as me.'
She stopped getting the same comments about her daughter's skin, and now feels like a huge burden has been taken off her shoulders. Some have even messaged to tell her they never realised their comments would offend her. Others have shared their own stories of colourism directed at their children. Many shared they get similar remarks offline – on the street, from strangers.
But some doubled down on their behaviour suggesting Mills is to blame for sharing her child online. Regardless, she's firm in knowing she did the right thing in sharing her story. But the situation has taken a huge toll on her.
'The past year has been like a blur,' she says. 'Because when you shut down, you pretty much just block everything out, and it feels like I blinked, and now I'm here.'