After Selah Marley opened up about some of the trauma that she experienced in her childhood, including being beaten by her parents, Lauryn Hill shared several lengthy Instagram posts reacting to her daughter’s claims.
“Selah has every right to express herself, I encourage it, but she also got the discipline that black children get because we are held to a different stands, Hill wrote on Thursday (Aug. 13). “The discipline was seen through the lens of a young child who also had no place to reconcile me as 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.”
Selah, is one of the five children that Hill shares with her ex, Rohan Marley. She also has a child from another relationship. Rohan, who married Brazilian model Barbara Fialho in 2019, has three children outside of his brood with Hill.
“To me, I am just me,” Hill continued. “If I am guilty of anything it is disciplining in anger, not in disciplining. The toxic venom I ingested for standing on principle, and confronting systematic racist far BEFORE it was the thing to say or do (everything you NOW celebrate everyone for!) — the people who called me CRAZY and have yet to apologize and say ‘oh yeah, we were wrong,’ OF COURSE that seeped into my home.”
Hill noted that Selah is on the “road to healing and contextualizing her childhood” and is allowed to process what she experienced. “But if you come for me, come for your own mama, and those absent fathers — come for them too, your grandparents, your great grand parents, your great great grand parents, Caribbean parents, African parents and everyone else damaged and judged for being black and forced to conform and assimilate to western standards of ‘order’ shaped through the filter and lens of anti-blackness.”
As the Grammy winner explained, she was under a lot of pressure while raising her family and living in the public eye. In another post, Hill pointed out fellow artists such as Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Sam Cooke, Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle, and others as examples of the perils of fame. “Sometimes fame and money amplify not only problems but can magnify the darkest and most cruel and selfish qualities in humans.”
In the third post, Hill directed her followers to watch The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for more context on her own story. Hill added that she was being gaslit daily amid her career success. Though she does feel remorseful for parenting her children through anger, Hill also pointed out that Selah was speaking on a “particular period of her childhood.”
“Once I learned what the business of art and commerce had the potential to be, I withdrew and sought out a different path. That path was carved out with my blood, my sweat, and my tears, for the purpose of creating a space for freedom that my children would be able to inherit,” the mother of six wrote in closing. “They’re growing into that truth and learning just how truly rare that space is.”
Read all of Hill’s posts below.
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