On Beauty and Colorism
Disclaimer: The dialogue in my posts has been fabricated (unless otherwise stated) but the stories I share are true personal experiences.
"Dude, this is SO good," you say between bites. I laugh, I love taking my friends here when I'm home. We're sitting in a small, hole-in-the-wall hispanic restaurant in Massachusetts, not your typical brunch place, but I was immensely craving Latin food after months away in Tennessee, where restaurants like these are almost inaccessible. The waitresses are fast-talking and gruff, collecting orders like roll call, but somehow nurturing all at once.
A waiter comes over and takes your dessert order, then mine, and when he hears I pronounce "tembleque" with a perfect Spanish accent, he looks at me, surprised. "What are you?" he asks. Um, a person? A woman? The possibilities are endless, really. "I'm Puerto Rican," I respond cautiously, almost dismissively (I'm also Dominican, but I was raised by a Puerto Rican, so I typically identify with the former). "Ah, makes sense. I figured you might be black, but then I thought "probably not, she's too pretty," he chuckles, and nonchalantly walks away.
You put your drink down and look at me. I won't make eye contact. I just sit. I drink and I swallow. It feels like 3 hours go by.
"Natalia," you say. The marathon my thoughts are running comes to a complete halt.
"This happens often to you, too, doesn't it?" you ask.
"Sometimes," I nod slowly. "I never know what to say."
"Well, there's a lot you're not saying right now," you say. And you're right, as usual. There's definitely a lot I'm not saying.
It's been a shared, unspoken struggle we've both carried within our respective communities: the standard of beauty is skewed.
We both grew up in traditional Caribbean homes. Mine was Puerto Rican and Dominican flavored. Yours was Haitian flavored. We get all the memes they make about our moms (lol), we've shared similar values, similar food and home structures, and we're also the darkest girls in our immediate families. And sometimes people don't seem to know what to make of that.
When I was 16, I got my first job at McDonalds (for some reason this surprises people and catches them off guard, but ya girl was out here flippin' burgers, okay). I was determined to start my own savings and be able to purchase most of my own things. I worked long shifts, early shifts, late shifts, whatever. The breakfast shifts were the worst because we were typically understaffed and we got a lot of angry people yelling about coffee. I was an overtly emotional and anxious 16-year-old, so having crowds of people angry at me all at once was definitely not on my list of desirable things. It took me a while to learn to block it out.
I saw a lot of different types on people on the job: druggies, frazzled moms, dads who would tell me their life stories while I rang up their fries, and middle aged hispanic men or young black men who would question me on my ethnicity.
"So like, you're not black, right?" "Are you like, mixed?" and the dreaded "I figured you couldn't be black, you're so pretty," and the "Oh wow, you're pretty for a black girl." (for a black girl? I'm sorry, what) The first time I heard it was like a punch to the face by a stranger (literally, but with words). Like, do I punch him back? How do I make him aware that he just verbally punched me when he thinks what he said is a compliment? For years, I've just kinda shrugged it off, seemed as if I didn't really understand what the person was saying, and just moved the conversation literally anywhere else.
"It happens to me a lot, too," you say. "I am undeniably a black woman, but when people feel the need to fact-check me, to make sure that wow, yeah she's definitely just black, they will typically hit me with the surprised 'wow, but you're so pretty!' comments. Sometimes, there will be women around my same skin tone who'll say 'you know, you're really pretty for a dark-skinned girl,' with a tone of assurance, yet surprise."
"So..." I start, analyzing. "While I get 'you're pretty because you're not black,' you get the 'you're pretty despite being black,' which is definitely a lot more hurtful," I say.
"It definitely can be. When people think I'm pretty and realize I'm fully black, it's almost like they've struck gold. ('Ooh, we got one!') Like it's a rarity for dark skin and beauty to coexist. And when they do, many will think it's a compliment to separate us from our skin color, but it's destructive and it's hurtful."
Issues of colorism run so, so deeply within Hispanic/Latin American and African American communities, and it's very much become an "us vs. them:" light-skinned women vs. dark-skinned women. It's an age-old oversimplification that really boils down to the belief that that the lighter your skin tone, the more beautiful and valuable you are. In the context of beauty, lighter skin is the metric of success in many communities. The standards of beauty and intelligence that have been praised and cultivated by the colonizer have then been adopted and cultivated by the colonized. They've been ingrained in us, to the point where, especially in Hispanic/Latin American communities, can be so subtle you almost don't even notice it. Almost.
So okay, I definitely have my own experience being color-struck. Especially when I hadn't come to terms with and fully grown into the beauty of my own skin.
When I was in the 5th grade, my two best friends and I had a stupid crush on this guy, let's call him Tim, who had a twin brother whom we're going to call Tom (I promise you their names were actually this similar in real life) but we all hated Tom because he was kind of a jerk and had an eerie looking bald spot in the back of his head (these are prime deal breakers when you're 10) and we'd also decided he was just not as cute as Tim even though they were literally identical twins.
When I was younger and realized I liked someone, I had a certain way I'd go about things: 1) I'd NEVER talk to them. 2) I'd only stare at them from across the room adoringly. Zero percent success rate thus far. Seriously, Little Nat was that derpy girl from the Rom-Coms, not even gonna front with you. Sometimes, Tim would ask me to borrow a pencil, or if I needed help carrying something, and I thought I was actually having a heart attack. But also, it was a weird crush in the sense that it was a shared crush with my two best friends, and none of us necessarily had dibs, but also if one of us flirted with him or ended up dating him, we would all just be really happy for that one friend.
One day, my dad was driving me home from school, and we were about a couple of streets away from my house when we were stopped behind a school bus. Cool, no big deal, just gonna wait for everyone to pile out and---Wait. Hold up.
"Dad, Dad... oh my gosh. That's Tim. I think that's Tim, Dad!" I freaked as I saw Tim step out of the bus.
"Who's Tim?!"
"He's this guy from school and I think he's just so---oh my gosh. I can't believe he lives this close to me. I have to know where he lives, you haveeee to follow him."
"Natalia, what."
"Dad, pleaaaaSEEE."
I don't think my dad remembers this, but he's probably not really proud of what happened next. Also, Tim, if you ever read this and somehow figure out I'm talking about you, I promise you it actually IS as creepy as it sounds. *sips drink*
So my dad just happened to casually drive down the same street that Tim walked down, I mentally jotted down which house he went into, and we went about the rest of our majestical daily lives. I got home, I called my best friends via 3-way-calling (that was like, a big thing back then) and we all proceeded to have 30 freak out sessions consecutively. For the rest of the year, I had my parents randomly drive by the intersection connecting to his street, just in case he was playing outside or something. Sometimes he was, and I was like "Wow, THERE IS A GOD!" And it was the highlight of the week.
Aside from all this, aside from me actually being painfully shy (and also a stalker) Tim was a light-skinned hispanic, and me, a darker skinned hispanic girl being noticed by a light-skinned hispanic guy equaled out to success. Although I found hispanics of dark skin to be attractive (my father is one), for years I made the choice to like men that looked nothing like me. I was "lightening the gene pool," (mejorando la raza) or what not, and when you're constantly putting yourself in a position to like a very specific type of person who looks nothing like you, it says an awful lot about your choices.
"I mean recently, I guess after Lupita got big, I noticed it was more trendy to like girls who look like me," you say. "I started getting a bit more attention from white and light-skin boys. Sometimes it seems almost like...validation to them? Like 'look at this pretty black girl on my arm. Natural hair, dark skin... See? I'm down! I'm woke!' It's hard to gauge who is actually interested in me and who wants to use me as an accessory."
I sit there, analyzing. I'm dumbfounded. I'd always admired your confidence, your beauty, your ability to command attention without demanding it--it has just fully struck me that this will not always be how the rest of the world views you. And truthfully, we both question our beauty often, especially within the trends and beliefs in our communities. But we've rarely, if ever, talked about it.
My boyfriend Phillip is a black man, and I don't emphasize his ethnic background to prove a point, but rather because in this context, it's important to how I grew into myself. He grew up on every state bordering Mexico (the guy has literally lived everywhere) and was attracted to, well, basically what you expect Latinas to look like: long flowing hair and lighter skin. When he and I first met, I had the long hair. I'd religiously chemically altered it for years, because since I couldn't be lighter skinned, I could at least have the long straight hair. I could be beautiful. I enjoyed being that girl. Until finally I didn't, and I realized I'd been neglecting my own potential for beauty. So I chopped off my hair. I went from being the "is she mixed? girl" to a straight up Afro-Latina, a black-hispanic with obvious African roots and features, and I wasn't scared to embrace them anymore. To Phillip, I'm not necessarily strictly under any label, he just finds me beautiful, and that has been healing and necessary.
"The empowerment of women can't just be a women thing," you tell me. "Men need to be in on it, too. It can't just be a group hug of women validating other women, but we need both women and men to tell the women in their lives that they are beautiful and great and valued in the skin they're in. Not in spite of it, but including it. Dark skin and Afrocentric features are not curses. We are beautiful and valued and worthy. Nat, say it with me."
I smile. "We are beautiful, valued, worthy, and smart."
"Yesss! We are. Well, maybe not always smart, but we are here." We laugh.
We pay for our food and you drive me home, and I nestle myself next to my mom on her bed while she watches her routinely telenovelas. She looks at me briefly. "Bellita," she starts, it's always been her nickname for me since I was young. "You need to get out in the sun more, you're getting way too light. Don't lose your color," she says to me in Spanish. "Sure, ma," I smile at her. I love her. I do.