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Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:
I have reached a stage in my life where I am utterly unashamed of claiming my 'angry black chick' space, my 'angry black chick' words because by God there is so much I have to be angry about and being fat and black has burned into the very core of my soul that I have a right to my anger - that often my anger is the beginning of my strength.
My niece said to me today that she wishes she was white. She refused to play in the sunshine today because she says she can't afford to get dark because very black people areugly. I cried today because of the poison that has already touched her soul - the ugly, ugly shallow shit that the world has already managed hurt her with. She's 6.
I sat her down and asked her if she thinks I'm ugly. I'm the darkest person in my family. The women in my family are all fair, all smaller than I am. For years I was openly called hideous to my face because of my darkness and I can't pretend here that I'm not…sensitive about the subject.
So I asked this little girl who is my heart and my soul if she thinks I'm ugly because I'm dark. She said no - shock in her eyes. I try to live every day as an example to this child. An example of womanhood who loves her body and her skin and her hair and yet in this I've failed. Somewhere I failed her. I asked her who had told her this - that dark people are uglier than light people. And she said nobody told her she just saw it. I hugged her then and cried because ofcourse she saw it - how could she help but see it.
It's in the thousands of creams that are sold daily on television advertising how black women can find their 'true' and more beautiful complexion. It's in the millions and millions of black women whohate their hair and openly speak scorn against their own, natural locks. Women who spend thousands and thousands of rands on looking as not black as they possibly can. She sees it in the music videos, in movies - the endless odes to fair, long haired women on our screens 24/7.
I love my weave. I love my braids. I love my wigs. I love looking as different and varied and colourful as I want to when I want to. I also love my kinky afro - love my wooly, glossy black curls because they are mine and because they are beautiful. But she's 6 and maybe I'm sending mixed messages her way by changing my hair, by looking different?? I don't know. I just know I never want to hear her speak such pain again. I don't want those words coming from her.
I have no remedy here. I have no solution. I'm just angry and so hurt. I'm angry that this golden child is growing up in a world determined to crush her God given beauty. I'm angry that she questions her worth, her power because she isn't white or blonde. I'm angry that my 6 year old darling is already measuring herself against other little girls for this nebulous, sexual approval from a world twisted so far from rightness and goodness and beauty that we fail to see our path even when it stares us in the face.
I'm angry too, I know, at myself. At those moments as a girl that I would have sold my soul to be thinner and a little yellower. I'm angry that those moments existed at all - that there wasn't a single adult who could tell me that I was lovely as I was - that me in my fat, black darkness was beautiful. Because I was. And I still am.
I wrote this to bear witness to this moment of anger and thank God for the peace already welling to fill my core.
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2 comments:
I almost cried off this. I have a mixed cousin who discussed black hair issues in a similar way. She was four at the time, and was beaming because everyone was complimenting her on her hair, which her mother, straightened upon the child's request. When I asked her what she liked about her hair she told me, "it looks white." I shared her answer with her grandmother, a beautiful coffee bean woman who, like me her tawny black niece (although I have the privilege of being lighter, thinner, and possessing longer hair), has her share of beauty issues. She was devastated, not because my cousin expressed self-hate, but because she said what none of the women who spent the day complimenting my cousin's hair (for the first time, I might add) wouldn't.
I wonder now how many of us will watch our nieces, cousins, and young daughters swallow the same self-hate we did.
I'm the Decadence who wrote the piece. I've been reading so many reactions to what I wrote, and kind of mourning anew at every heart shattering story, but also marveling at how much we all share, at how we all want to see the change. I believe, utterly, in the saying: Be the change you want to see in the world. It gives my heart strength to see so many women striving for and speaking about and living that change. Change cannot help but come in the face of our power.twoface1
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