Mimi Mbah

Mimi Mbah

photo: Instagram/dopelike_mimi

Mimi Mbah, a 19-year-old college student in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is fed up with trolls attempting to disparage her skin complexion. The aspiring model let the verbal chopper spray on one particular harasser who left a shaming comment on a recent Twitter post.

On April 1, African Beauties, a Twitter account that highlights the beauty of African people, shared several of Mbah's gorgeous Instagram photos.

Twitter user lybonv2 deemed it a good idea to respond by shaming Mbah's darker skin.

Mimi Mbah skin-shaming
photo: Screenshot from Twitter/lybonv2

However, she got the last laugh. "No thanks, I wouldn't trade my skin color for the world!" she tweeted.

Mimi Mbah
photo: Screenshot from Twitter/dopelike_mimi

Her tweet quickly went viral amassing over 21,000 retweets and 58,000 likes.

Mbah's tweet quickly flamed her opponent, but she told BuzzFeed News she's unsurprised by his initial response.

A post shared by Mimi???????? (@dopelike_mimi) on

"It's happened to me before and I think almost every dark skin girl can say the same too," she said. "I'm glad my tweet went viral because now I feel like I have a platform which I want to use to talk about things like that and give advice to other dark-skin women who are going through similar situations and probably blaming themselves for it.

Unfortunately, darker-skinned women are often subjected to hateful remarks about their complexions.

A post shared by Mimi???????? (@dopelike_mimi) on

It's one of the tangible results of colorism, a system defined by sociologist Margaret Hunter as "a process that privileges light-skinned people of color over dark."

Taunting is one facet of colorism, but it also impacts the life outcomes of darker-skinned people of color. As Hunter highlighted, colorism impacts everything from income and education to housing and incarceration rates.

By publicly chiding a troll, Mbah hopes that she made a statement about the harmfulness of colorism.

"I actually wanted people to see that colorism is still real," she told BuzzFeed News.