A Complex Ain’t Simple

When there is a conversation over beauty and/or preferences, the most frustrating responses I hear are along the lines of “Well, why do you care what someone else thinks about you?”, “You can’t worry about a man who don’t want you anyway!” and “Talking about this stuff just keeps us divided!” Here are a few reasons why it isn’t that simple:

1) People are effected by their relation to what society deems to be beautiful. It’s not simply a matter of wanting to be attractive to a particular group of people. Childhood bullying, preferential or discriminatory treatment in the classroom, workplace, social settings, etc., the influence of images seen in the media and, yes, the attraction or lack thereof from people one might want to date…all of these factors can be of great consequence to the self-image, the lifestyle and the worldview of a person. This doesn’t make a woman weak or desperate to be acceptable to a certain man, this makes her a human being who is shaped by the world in which she lives. Even if one chooses to totally reject all societal notions of what is or isn’t beautiful, she is still apt to be treated according to how she relates to what others see. 

2)We have seen, throughout the history of the planet, people go through drastic measures in order to fit in to a society’s notion of beautiful. While some efforts may not be bad (i.e. a woman working out to maintain a healthy shape that she herself enjoys), others may be damaging (such as starving oneself from a size 8 to a size 0, which may not be a healthy size for said person) or may reveal potentially debilitating self-esteem issues that have led one to attempt unreasonable changes to their appearance (using skin bleaching creams to lighten one’s skin). 

3) There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be perceived attractive. It’s natural to crave affection and attention from others. 

4) The things that we find attractive or beautiful can reveal a great deal about our own self-esteem and self-identity. When a Black girl picks up a White baby doll as opposed to a Black one and says “This is the pretty one”, that can be a sign of a serious problem. When 20 Black girls out of 25 repeat the same action in a study, that IS a sign of a serious problem. When we look at magazines, movies and music videos and see that certain forms of Black beauty are disproportionately represented in the absence of others, that IS a serious problem. These images in the media shape how people define or understand beauty, sometimes even more than one’s parents or community. It’s hard to get mad at a dark-skinned brother with a light-skinned fetish when he has been fed a steady diet of of Rap videos and Black films that have presented one group of women as some sort of prize. Especially if he grew up in a household in which his family didn’t discuss Black beauty or ensure that he understood that Black women of all shades and looks are beautiful and that there should be no complexion hierarchy in his mind.
The more narrow the definition of beauty, the more pain is possible for those who don’t fit. Furthermore, their is something troubling when we see people of African descent idealize European standards of beauty and/or upholding their own standard of beauty that penalises people for looking more “traditionally African”. So what is the remedy? We have to attack and dismantle the status quo. We have to have painful, honest and new conversations about color, because not talking about it isn’t going to make our color issues disappear. We can not write off dark skinned persons who raise the issue of color as “bitter”, nor dismiss the thoughts of lighter-complexioned brothers and sisters as ”uninformed”. Neither category owns the definitive Black experience with colorism. Members of both ends of the spectrum have been subject to undue privilege and/or maltreatment as a result of our unhealthy relationship to color. And until we unpack and identify our issues, we can’t adequately change the images we see, nor how we see one another.

When I wrote that Clutch piece last week, a number of folks commented that they have not had bad experiences with color and others accused me of ignoring that and pushing a dated issue. Don’t get me wrong: I am GLAD to hear there are women who feel that they have been exempt from some of the most unnecessary painful experiences our people have dealt with in this country. And I would be unreasonable to say there has been no progress since the days of the paper bag and ruler test. However, the color complex is alive and well and five people saying on a blog “I don’t have these issues” does not negate that in any way, shape or form. I do revisit this topic often and I don’t have any intention of stopping. I think it’s bizarre that someone would perceive that to be a chip on my shoulder, but it’s not something I can go out of my way to disprove. I’m going to keep writing about what I see fit and when I no longer see problems with the way we define Black beauty, then I will be all bees and trees and flowers in this b*tch, I promise.