A student has been praised for her courage after hitting back at a racist Twitter user who said she would be more attractive if ‘she was lighter’.

Mimi Mbah, 19, who is from Cameroon and lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland, exposed the man by sharing his tweet with the reply: ‘No thanks I wouldn’t trade my skin colour for the world’.

The aspiring model, whose response has won the support of tens of thousands online, received the abuse after her Instagram photographs were featured on a Twitter account called African Beauties.

A screengrab showed a message from Twitter user, who writes under the name ‘Tosh’, that read: ‘If she was lighter, she’d be fire’

Mimi’s reply has attracted hundreds of supportive comments, over 20,000 re-tweets and more than 56,000 likes.

Although she was not surprised by the message, she said she ‘definitely felt disappointed’ and has never encountered abuse like it before.

She told Daily Mail Online: ‘Reading the comments I definitely felt disappointed to see that there are still people out there that shame others for the darkness of their skin, but it didn’t surprise me because I’ve heard comments like those before.’

She added: ‘I wanted to stand up not only for me but for anybody who has felt or feel less than due to the ignorance of others.’

Mimi said she did not receive an apology from ‘Tosh’ but added: ‘I hope he’s learned from this.’

She is happy that her tweet gained so much traction because it has helped her raise awareness of the issue.

She told BuzzFeedNews: ‘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…I actually wanted people to see that colorism is still real.’

Mimi said the comment demonstrates why some women are not confident about their appearance.

‘Overall I want all my dark skin girls to know that we are chocolate goddesses no matter what anyone says,’ she said.