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We live in a society that is governed by what it looks like. As much as we praise the importance of inner beauty, personality, achievement, and the like, all too often what we value first is our appearance. In the United States, white aesthetics has historically been the standard that non-white women adhere to when it comes to appreciating their beauty, which is automatically a losing proposition for us. For colored women, watching our hairstyles, fashion choices and aesthetics be appropriated and praised in mass society when worn by white women and demonized when colored women have the same hairstyles, fashion and aesthetics, is a bitter pill to swallow.
Against this background, it is no wonder that as a young colorful girl I tried to find and understand the beauty in myself.
Don’t get me wrong: I have always felt accepted and loved by my family and community. But I always stuck out like a sore thumb. The school and family photos looked like a “Where’s Waldo” fairy tale, where all you had to do to find me was pick one piece of pepper in the salt, which was pretty easy to make.
When I was young, being beautiful didn’t matter much to me, as I was more obsessed with a mini-existential crisis in which I too often had to explain my existence to people. Sometimes it seemed to me that I had to justify my presence in white spaces – for example, the time when I was about 12 and riding my bike to a nearby ice cream stand and while waiting in line, the man in front of me started giving me the third degree of where. I’m asking me if I’m a foster child, or my mother was cleaning the house for someone around and brought me with her. When he didn’t like my answers (that I lived nearby) because “I couldn’t be from his neighborhood,” I had to stand in my place and explain that I was really from his neighborhood as I blinked tears – and his wife , finally noticing this, urging him to “leave the poor child alone.”
Statements such as “no, I’m not adopted” or “no, I’m not a foster child; this is my mother ”were regular choruses when I was little. Several times I even told friends that my skin color was essentially a “permanent tan,” so they stopped asking me why I was brown when my parents were white. (When I was a baby, my mother married another man – a white man – who adopted me and raised me as her own.)
As a child, I often looked closely at my family members; my grandparents, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, recognizing the similarities between them, but never seeing myself reflected back in their faces. Looking at pictures of my biological father also did not evoke any recognition for himself; it was like looking at a stranger because he was.
I listened to all kinds of music at the time and consumed pop culture insatiably, as all good teenagers and teenagers do. I was exposed to images and images of beautiful and famous black women – Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Jada Pinkett, Nia Long and others. But their aesthetics and beauty were foreign to me, because the most influential women in my life were the closest to me, which made them all automatically beautiful in my eyes.
The challenge for me then was to know that I could never look like them. My hair was not straight and long, but rather curly and deceptively short. Their eyes were blue or green; mine were honey brown. Their skin was white and mine was bronze. At one point I tried to straighten my hair by loosening it and I was terribly burned by the chemicals. It was tenth grade and the last time I tried to relax my hair.
At the time, I never considered myself attractive or unattractive. It was just me and I worked with what I had. My friends and family did their best to build me up, telling me how cute I was or how good I looked in the different ensembles I put together; I obviously had my own special sense of fashion and style. I always appreciated the compliments, but I accepted the compliments because they loved me and I didn’t take their words too seriously.
When I grew up and the boys started getting into the picture, I remember being told countless times that I was “beautiful for a black girl.” I was and always am incredulous of how these guys can really believe this is a compliment. In my head I always thought what does this mean – am I beautiful or not? Shouldn’t I have been beautiful because I was black?
One boy told me in his face that although he found me beautiful, he could never “take me home” because his parents would not accept me. He said that I would have to be at the level of women in TLC (the popular R&B band from the 90’s to the early 00’s) in order for him to “bring me home”. When he said that, I literally snorted and thought “you want” (because he never had a chance to start with me and suggested that I think going home to meet his parents was a privilege … it wasn’t t), immediately got out of the conversation and I never talked to him again because I was so procrastinating.
So what ultimately helped me turn the corner and begin to recognize my beauty? I think it was a combination of things, the main thing was the deliberate self-education I was undergoing.
When I matured, I realized that my friends and family are quite beautiful and that their type of beauty is simply the preferred social aesthetic archetype. I also knew on a deep level that this aesthetic was not for me. In a way, this realization took the pressure off me during high school and allowed me to focus on other things. I realized early on that compliance in this sense was useless, and I made peace with him.
Because I had abandoned the need to comply and didn’t spend as much time on how I looked, I delved into the passions, hobbies, and activities that made me happiest — activities like student government, sports, marching, and group concerts, teenage improvisational theater and many others. These activities helped me find my voice and allowed me to make my own small niche in the world.
One of the best parts of these activities was that they also exposed me to many people outside the ethnically monolithic community in which I was raised. The people I met through these activities came from more diverse backgrounds and had different worldviews. They generously shared with me some of these experiences and perspectives. Then my perspective on the world began to expand. With this expanded worldview, I was able to look at myself with better eyes, which helped me to contextualize and remove the lens of racism that had tarnished my perception for too long.
When I began to get to know and explore other cultures and different standards of beauty, this led to the assessment that beauty comes in many forms – including mine. Finding elements of myself in these other non-mainstream places helped me normalize that beauty should not be limited to the very narrow box dictated by society.
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