For a considerable amount of time, I felt that I was never pretty enough. Despite being born into a multiracial country and then moving to NYC, which is perhaps one of the most diverse cities in the world, I felt as if simply being myself was never enough. There was always something that I had to do - stay out of the sun to avoid getting darker, straighten my hair to appear more presentable, etc. There’s even a word to describe curly hair in my country, no matter how styled or not it is- ‘pajon’.
Pajon. This word is only five letters long, yet it is full of history and the racism that it entails. Any type of hair that deviates from smooth, flawless straight was considered unkempt. And it has been this way for a long time. I grew up watching movies like Mean Girls where the flatter the butt or the blonder your hair, the more you would be liked. And although it is fiction, this is a stereotype that has persisted throughout the decades. People do treat you differently depending on how you present yourself. As a black woman, I am a sharp contrast to the women I often look up to on social media. I have deep brown skin and a body comparably curvier than those we are bombarded with in advertisements and beauty pageants. I certainly wouldn't be the main character in a show like Euphoria, where the only character that deviates from the slender cast is subjected to sexualization and humiliation within the show itself. Once I even ran my own experiment my senior year of high school. I have found that the more I imitated these features that were consistently portrayed in gossip magazines and movies as the more likable, perhaps even desirable, traits, the better I got treated. I wore my natural hair out for a week, and (not) to my surprise, I got a plethora of negative reactions. My mother told me “do” my hair, implying that my curls were innately unkempt despite me spending almost thirty minutes each morning styling them. It was almost as if she found it hard to believe that I could like what the hair growing out of my own head looked like. The classmates I sat in front of made irritated comments about my hair ‘blocking’ their view. As soon as I straightened my hair the following week, the comments stopped. It is my birthright to embrace my natural hair despite its texture, as it is also my birthright to feel beautiful and respected despite my figure or skin color, yet why was this never enough? At this point it's safe to say that this issue of the so-called beauty standard is something that transcends borders, haunting the members of the African diaspora and others whose features have also been villainized for decades, if not centuries.
So where do black features belong within the beauty standard? I recognize my privilege as a more ‘palatable’ black girl in society, but those of us with more prominent features get absolutely no type of validation not just from the media, but from society itself. It's almost as if people feel entitled to comment on black women’s bodies. Prominent figures like Lizzo can’t post a bikini picture without people commenting on her looks unprovoked in the comment section, whereas somebody like Adriana Lima is praised for her body and called ‘sexy’. Black women who wear protective styles are called ‘ghetto’ for wearing hair that is not theirs, but a European rapper can get box braids for a music video and be celebrated for being ‘trendy’. It's very disheartening to see how black features are minimized and have historically been tied to negative attributes. An advertisement for a sports brand would get a very different reaction if a fat, black woman were the model than if a slender, blonde one. Nobody would believe that a black woman, especially one larger than the average model, could even think about wearing sportswear. As mentioned in Briana Dominici’s article, words like ‘lazy’, ‘ugly’ and ‘mammy’ are associated with fat people, specially with black women in the U.S. Even as late as the early 1930s, African American women were still associated with the mammy caricature, which were black maids or slaves that took care of white children. African American women have been battling for decades to challenge the prevalent beauty standard through movements such as the Body Positivity Movement in the 1960s and the Natural Hair Movement in the 2010s, yet their attempts have been of relatively little success. Yes, there are more black women that are learning to appreciate and celebrate the features, the features that got us through centuries of adversity and resilience. Yet, there is still doubt among many young black girls that are growing up with little to no positive representation of what it is to be a proud black woman. A woman who understands the history behind her features, who loves her body no matter the figure, who loves her skin no matter the shade of brown, and one who loves her hair and treats it with care. In order to truly distance ourselves from the beauty standard which excludes these incredible features, we have to learn that the true ‘beauty standard’ is the one we make for ourselves. Once we show up for ourselves, wear our hair out the way it grows as twisted and complex as our history, unapologetically take pictures without brightening filters, and show up to that interview with clothing that suits our shapes, is when we will take one step further to being our most confident, proud selves.
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