Days after Selah Marley opened up about her childhood and the “discipline” she endured while living with her mother Lauryn Hill, Hill went on Facebook to address her daughter’s experiences and the public’s backlash.
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Lauryn Hill expressed her thoughts after Selah disclosed the trauma she endured in her childhood and said her daughter has “every right to express herself and I encourage it. but she got the discipline that black children get because we are held to a different standard.” Hill blamed systemic racism along with her anger as to how she decided to raise her children. “The discipline was seen through the lens of a young child who also had no place to reconcile me as a mom, and me as a larger than life public figure. It took me a while to realize that my children, and probably everyone who knew me saw me in this duality. To me, I am just me. If I am guilty of anything it is disciplining in anger, not in the discipline,” she wrote.
She continues to say that her children’s upbringing resulted from being in the spotlight and wanting to protect her children at all times.
“When I realized that the pressure on me was so incredibly hypocritical and unfair, criminal even, that even my children weren’t allowed to be children, I stepped away. I wasn’t removed, I STEPPED AWAY. Weening myself and my family from the addictions that systems of control attempt to use through fame and celebrity is no joke. It’s painful and people were not above using my children to keep exploiting me. Keeping a child sober-minded in the midst of everyone trying to seduce and bribe and coerce is an incredibly challenging thing to do. Sell a few million copies of a recording and see the wolves and sharks for yourself before you determine what’s appropriate and what’s not. The danger was REAL! And this danger I faced alone, unsupported as I should have been, and dumped on by the same people who only a few years before built a fortune off the same gifts they later tried to deny and then COPY.”
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The singer also addressed the consequences of being in the spotlight along with naming deceased artists such as Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, and many others.
“We all hate abuse and exploitation, sometimes in an effort to fight against it we can easily become the abuser, the exploiter, and THIS is what we have to watch for. No one is exempt from needing to watch themselves in this way.”
After Selah‘s Instagram live went viral, she defended her parents after fans started to criticize the former couple for her and her sibling’s trauma:
“The discussion I had was a larger conversation about a certain trauma that I’ve experienced from a lack of unity in the household. This is nothing new. As a matter of fact, this is commonplace for many people & I’m glad so many of you were about to resonate with the healing that I speak of, but PLEASE do not go bashing my parents right now–especially my father. I never said I didn’t love them.”