Loving the Skin I'm In

Art by Fenell Wilkins | VOX Staff

By Fenell Wilkins | VOX Staff

As a child, I hated everything about the way I looked, from my dark skin to my short, coarse hair. I felt like there was no point in trying to feel beautiful and embrace my physical features because my classmates always teased me. One day in junior high, a boy decided he was going to humiliate me in front of the whole class by asking me who my boyfriend was. I told him that I didn’t have one. Then another classmate said, “Ugly African girl, you will stay single for the rest of your life.” I was actually born in New York, but my classmates – who were also black – assumed I was born in the Motherland because I’m dark. (What’s funny is that not all Africans are dark, like my uncle who was born in Liberia. He’s really fair.)
I was called all kinds of names like nappy headed and big-eyed alien, so ever since I was little I had a low self-esteem. People would ask me why I don’t show my real hair when I wore braids. I usually ignored the question. The first thing they’d say is: “It’s because you ain’t got no hair. That’s why you keep it braided all the time.” The insults used to hurt me a lot. It’s sad that people would look down on me because I enjoy being creative with my natural hair. I used to relax my hair, but I didn’t have the patience to continuously put chemicals on it every other month, even though soft so-called good hair is what people are used to seeing.
It wasn’t until high school that I decided to stop listening to my peers’ insults and to be thankful for how God made me.

Dark, Light, What?
In the black community, we look down on our own people by judging others by skin complexion. We compare each other to stars and let the media poison our minds. Growing up I always saw BET, MTV and
TV One showing light-skinned ladies with long hair as glamorous and sexy. There were barely any dark-skinned ladies in music videos and movies. In the media and in reality, light-skinned girls were known to be the most popular, and every guy would try to get with them. Guys would just pass darker girls by and not even give them a chance unless they had big butts and long hair (mostly extensions). I still don’t fit the media’s image of a pretty black girl: you know, light skin, long hair, small waist and big behind.
Most of the successful black women in Hollywood are lighter skinned, like Beyonce, Halle Berry, Ciara, Faith Evans, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Monica, Jordan Sparks, Keyshia Cole, Kerry Washington and Vanessa Williams. It was hard for me come up with dark-skinned stars like Gabrielle Union, Kelly Rowland, Alek Wek, Naomi Campbell and Monique.
In Spike Lee’s 1988 movie “School Daze,” dark-skinned girls and fair-skinned girls stayed apart from each other, and dark-skinned girls were looked down on. So at the end of the day a dark-skinned girl may look at her own people as the enemy for rejecting her. In junior high, I didn’t get along with my own people because they were always putting me down.
I don’t think beauty is based on how you look. Black beauty is all about pride, how you feel about yourself and being a genuine person. Being beautiful is being happy with who you are regardless of how society looks at you.

Embracing My Color
I started to learn how to love myself in the beginning of high school. My peers still made fun of me, but I realized that there may be things they didn’t like about themselves too. And in order to make themselves feel good, they put me and others down. So I decided to stop worrying about what my peers had to say and just look at them as ignorant, foolish and not having anything better to do with their own time.
I finally learned not to take the things they say so literally and just be proud of who I am. There have been many times when fair-skinned classmates of mine said they wished they were my complexion, because they wanted the soft skin most dark-skinned people have.
Now if someone comes up to me and says, “You’re cute for being dark skinned,” I say to them, “Thanks, but, not all fair-skinned folks are fine looking either.” I’ve realized that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and everyone has their own outlook on beauty. Regardless of if you’re dark, caramel or fair, you have to be happy with who you are first.