Selah Marley went on Instagram live recently and candidly spoke about her not-so-perfect relationship with her parents, Lauryn Hill and Rohan Marley.
She described the singer as “very angry” during her childhood and alleged that she used discipline as a means to control her and her siblings. People blew her comments out of proportion, and Selah eventually had to tell her followers not to “go bashing my parents — especially my father. I never said that I did not love them. I said their shortcomings created trauma that I now need to consciously and actively heal from.”
Lauryn surprisingly responded to Selah’s Instagram live in a lengthy Facebook post. “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 standard,” Hill wrote. “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. To me, I am just me. If I am guilty of anything it is disciplining in anger, not in disciplining.”
Lauryn Hill went through a lot after her career peaked, and she admitted that the hardship created a toxic environment in her home.
“My life has been about protecting my children from all kinds of danger, and that’s only possible when you protect yourself from the danger as well,” she wrote.
“We’re both learning and healing, and each of my children has a similar story and journey. All of you in a rush to crucify someone, careful who you string up or nail up. You might have an extremely limited view of the actual reality,” Hill said in response to the backlash she has received in wake of Selah’s remarks. “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.”
