In Loving My Light Skin, I Hated Myself
Dear God,
Thank you for a good day today. Thank you for my Mommy and my Nana and my family. Thank you for waking me up and giving me life and for making the world pretty. And thank you for making me pretty and light-skinned. I love you. Good night.
As a young girl, I would recite a variation of that prayer every night before bed. With such an innocent and well-meaning disposition, I would thank God for the things that I was happy to have. I loved my family immensely, I loved playing outside, and I absolutely loved my light skin. God could have been unkind and made me much darker, I thought. What a shame it would have been, I imagined, to be picked on by the boys at school, to have short, kinky, nappy hair, and to be mean all the time. I rarely saw dark-skinned girls in beauty commercials or as the ‘it girl’ everyone wanted to date on television shows or in movies. I rarely saw dark-skinned girls with long, flowing hair. I rarely saw dark-skinned girls happy. They always seemed so angry, I thought.
I, on the other hand, was light. I saw the sun glimmer in my skin. I saw the potential of being more than just Black. I saw that my skin, in combination with a fresh perm, could allow a stranger to ponder if I was mixed. My hair was long, my skin was bright, and my features were subtle. I had the perfect attributes to be considered a beautiful girl. When my skin grew tan in the summer and anyone commented on my darker hue, I would immediately remind them that I would lighten back up in the winter. When the days grew shorter and the sun more subdued, I would dance with excitement as my “true” color returned. So enamored I was with the parts of me that were considered beautiful, I didn’t realize until much later that I had never truly looked at myself, for myself. I had never truly looked at any Black person.
The white gaze was the lens through which I saw myself and other Black people. The white gaze was the only point of view there was. Stories and images of Black people in the media were rarely told by Black people. They weren’t written by Black people. They weren’t seen through the eyes of Black people. Much of what I consumed from society, or rather much of what was force-fed to me, was through the distorted, prejudiced, singular perspective of white people. I had no grasp of my history at that age. I didn’t know what colorism was — an abhorrent tactic created and used by slave masters to separate my ancestors based on skin tone. I couldn’t conceptualize that the feelings of love I had for myself were actually centuries-old seeds of self-hatred, planted ever so deeply and purposefully into the folds of my psyche without my consent.
When I finally confronted the troubling thoughts and desires I once had as a young Black girl, I was overcome with grief and bewilderment. I had hated all the parts of me that were undeniably Black. I pitied dark-skinned girls because I thought they had no choice but to accept who they were. They couldn’t escape their race. They couldn’t pretend to mixed — to be more. I had the audacity to feel bad for them while contributing to their pain. I thought they were mean, when they were really just hurt. Not only was white society telling them they weren’t attractive, but their own race was showing them that they didn’t matter. I thought to myself, what terrible circumstances Black children were left with: hate yourself because society is actively telling you to do so, or hate yourself and be foolishly blind to your own self-hatred.
The truth is, as a Black person, you can never truly love yourself without loving all of you. By you, I mean we. All of the shades we come in, all of the textures of our hair, all of the nuances within our complicated narrative. We carry so much weight on our shoulders, including the burdens of those we share our skin and culture with. What comes with that pain, however, is also joy. We can share the good and the bad, but not without understanding that our varying shades don’t divide us; they accentuate us in a sun-kissed, melanin-rich shield of armor that others can only dream of having.
So much power lies within us. So much untapped energy just waiting to break through the surface — through the racism, the biases, the lies, the envy, the misconceptions, the subjugation, the fear. I have full faith that one day we will harness all of that magical energy and unleash our truest form, unequivocally free of the stifling white gaze. Only when we begin to reaffirm, and eventually instill at birth, how beautiful our Black girls and boys are just the way that they are, will we begin to gain significant traction in our journey to self-preservation. No longer should we be waiting until adulthood to fully accept, love, and know ourselves.
If you need an extra push, let me be the first to tell you that I love you, fully and authentically. You are beautiful, you matter, and your skin is rich and majestic.
In Loving My Light Skin, I Hated Myself
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