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“The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”
I’ve had a couple of moments—okay, months, maybe years—where the idea of disappearing and never being seen again seemed like an appealing option.
This speaks to me on so many levels. I’ve thought about doing this so many times I can’t count. Just fall off the face of the earth and start over.
I remember the moment I realized I was free, looking in a mirror and saying, “I choose my motherfucking self.”
And you know what I do choose me. Every time and everyday I’ll choose me!
I have to wonder if I will pay a consequence for telling my truth.
Also speaks to me because I can be brutally honest even about myself. And sometimes I think someone will use this against me. Breaking free of that fear.
“Stay afraid, but do it anyway.” So cheers. Here’s to us being afraid and doing it anyway.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Most black people grow accustomed to the fact that we have to excel just to be seen as existing, and this is a lesson passed down from generation to generation. You can either be Super Negro or the forgotten Negro.
People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.
“You were fly, dope, and amazing from birth,” I would tell that girl now. “From the second you took your first breath, you were worthwhile and valid. And I’m sorry you had to wait so long to learn that for yourself.”
Now I see That’s Not Your Vagina being a great title for this little one-act play, but then I didn’t see the humor.
“Look, you can’t take your pussy with you,” I said. “Use it. Enjoy it. Fuck, fuck, fuck, until you run out of dicks. Travel to other countries and have sex. Explore the full range of everything, and feel zero shame. Don’t let society’s narrow scope about what they think you should do with your vagina determine what you do with your vagina.”
Enough with teaching people to pretend that sex is only for procreation and only in the missionary position and only upon taking the marital oath. If you’re having consensual sex with another adult, enjoy it.
So repeat after me: I resolve to embrace my sexuality and my freedom to do with my body parts as I see fit. And I will learn about my body so I can take care of it and get the pleasure I deserve. I will share that information with anyone and everyone, and not police the usage of any vagina but my own. So help me Judy Blume.
“Look, this is my original color,” I would say, proffering my shoulder to a white girl. “Look how light I am.” I was really saying, “I have a chance to get back to that shade, so please excuse my current darkness.”
the relaxer gave me chemical burns. I was willing to disfigure myself in order to be deemed “presentable” and “pretty.” To be truly seen.
At twelve, I had not been once called pretty. Not by friends, not by my family, and certainly not by boys.
I was completely and utterly alone and invisible.
That misguided goal remained unattainable, of course, but I could always tell the difference in the way people treated me when I came fresh from getting my hair done professionally.
I was not going to give her the opportunity to hand that eight-by-ten glossy to my grandmother so she could frame it next to photos of my cousins who had lighter skin and straight hair.
7th Heaven, in the nineties. I have always had very good weaves, so when I cut my weave for Daddy’s Little Girls and Breakin’ All the Rules, people thought I was just “crazy experimental with my hair.” No, I am just crazy experimental with hair that I can purchase. After a certain point, when my natural hair was long and healthy, I just put it up in a bun. I didn’t politicize my choice. It was another option, that’s it. Then, because
It would be naïve of me to say that hair is just an accessory. I recognize that black hair has been politicized, and not by us. We have since reclaimed that politicization. We have ascribed certain characteristics to people who rock a natural look versus weaves and wigs. If you choose to have natural hair, or even to promote the idea of natural hair, you are somehow a better black person than someone with a weave or someone who straightens their hair. You have transcended pettiness and escaped the bonds of self-esteem issues. But I have traveled around the world and I know this to be true:
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Maybe one day, when I’m a real grown-up, I will wear my hair natural and I won’t contour my nose. Hell, I’ll just be me. And hopefully people will accept me the way I am.
That feeling of surveillance, of being hunted, never goes away. Fear influences everything I do. I saw the devil up close, remember. And I see now how naïve I was.
“You know, you are really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.”
Issues of colorism run so deep in the African American community, but more and more I see it spring up on social media as #teamlightskin versus #teamdarkskin. It’s an age-old us-against-us oversimplification that boils down to the belief that the lighter your skin tone, the more valuable and worthy you are.
The standard of beauty and intelligence that has historically been praised by the oppressor has been adopted by the oppressed.
My mother told me that she married a darker-skinned black man because she didn’t want her kids to have “light-skin problems.”
My mother felt the burden, but I witnessed the privilege. Inheriting my father’s skin, but growing up in proximity to my mother’s lightness and to the lightness of my cousins, I saw how people across the whole color spectrum responded differently to them than they did to me.
was impossible not to grow to resent that.
but our pain at being passed over also shouldn’t be dismissed by people saying, “Love the skin you’re in.” You can love what you see in the mirror, but you can’t self-esteem your way out of the way the world treats you.
“The truth is, there are just certain men that are not and will never check for you,” she says. “At least not seriously.”
“People tell me I’m just imagining these feelings,” she said; they think she’s exaggerating the effects of colorism she experiences professionally and socially. She’s not. She is not imagining this shit, and she is not alone.
have my own case study. My first husband was dark skinned, and I was the darkest-skinned woman he ever dated. Once he got a little success in football, he told me, “I wanted the best.” What he considered the best, a sign that he had “made it,” was dating light-skinned girls.
“It’s hard to gauge who really likes me,” she continued, “and who just wants to use me as an accessory. I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m not worthy, so when someone says that I am, it feels like a setup.”
“It’s lightening up my gene pool,” one guy boldly told me. “If I have a baby with you, we’re gonna have a black-ass baby.”
That’s some shit, and it hurts. We talked about the disconnect between the adoration so many black men shower on their mothers and grandmothers and their refusal to spend the rest of their lives with a woman who resembles their hue. “Why isn’t the same type of woman good enough or even worth considering?” she asked me. “And do they even know they’re doing this?”
There is another question I have to ask. Aren’t these men also acutely aware of what it is to move through this world in the body of a dark brown boy?
say this as someone who was certainly guilty of being color struck when I began dating. In my junior year of high school, I knew I was cute because I began pulling people that dark-skinned black girls were not supposed to pull.
Eventually I didn’t necessarily need to be the girlfriend. I just needed these guys to choose me in the moment, over someone else. That line of thinking can get you very sexually active very quickly. And it just kind of got away from me. You find yourself, a couple of Keystone Lights in, kissing some random guy in the bathroom of a house party. Some guy you don’t know at all, who maybe isn’t even your type, but just looked your way . . . and you needed that validation fix.
was so ingrained in me that I didn’t see it as an active choice that I was friend-zoning anyone with more melanin than me. In my early twenties, someone finally did an intervention.
“Look,” I said, “I actually don’t think about that stuff. Love sees no color.” “Bullshit,” he said. “To say ‘love sees no color’ is dumb as fuck.
talked about feeling passed over for white and lighter-skinned girls and the rush I felt every time I got someone they were supposed to get.
It wasn’t my preference for light-skinned guys. It was all about their preference for me.
I could truly love my own skin, then I was not going to see darker skin as a threat to my worthiness and my value. Then it was come one, come all.
“Oh,” she said immediately, “nobody wants to get darker.” It was that simple. I could tell it immediately dawned on her that she’d just told a black person that nobody wants to get dark. So she switched to “they.” “They want their color to be just like him,” she continued, pointing to a crew member traveling with me. “White.”
“FOR A BLACK GIRL YOU SURE ARE PRETTY!” This is the white cousin
of “pretty for a dark-skinned girl.”
“Why do you say, ‘for a black girl’?” “I don’t know,” he said. He told himself, and me, that he just didn’t know black girls, so he was color-blind. The same way I had done when I was actually color struck.
I always want there to be a point to what I am saying, and I don’t want to bring up the issue of colorism just to bring it up, or simply teach white readers about strife within the black community. At the very least, I of course want my friend to know she is not alone in her feelings about colorism. But I want to expect more than that. For years, we have advised women of color—light and dark—that the first step to healing is to acknowledge that colorism exists.
