A How-To Guide to Having Dark Skin and Trying (But Failing) to Love it
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“‘A How-To Guide to Having Dark Skin and Trying (But Failing) to Love it’ is a research essay written for Dr. Henderson’s ‘Writing 1’ class in Fall of 2014.
This piece delves into the dichotomous sorts of identities that black women (both in America and abroad) are forced to reconcile as they begin to understand that this overwhelmingly white-commanded, overwhelmingly male-domineered world is not necessarily working in their favor.
This piece won Washington University’s 2014 Freshman Writing Prize and was originally published in Washington University in St. Louis’s Ampersand Journal in 2015.
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What’s dark and skin-y and disconsolate all over? A dark-skinned girl’s shame as she tries to make sense of her covering in a world that just won’t let her breathe.
When Lupita Nyong’o hit the big screen in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave in August of 2013, the universe, save me, went wild. She was graceful, she was stunning, she was radiant, a dark-skinned beauty with the world at her feet and a crown of approval atop her well-sheared fade. While America loved Lupita and admired her at every step of the way, I did not. To me, the media’s coos of “radiant beauty Lupita Nyong’o wowed crowds at the awards ceremony tonight in her pale blue gown that contrasted so perfectly with her ebony body” and “Nubian starlet, Lupita Nyong’o, captivates audiences in bright red lips that boldly stood out against her Starbucks Dark Roast® skin at the semi-annual gala” seemed disingenuous at best, dehumanizing at worst.
These Stevia-coated claims shrouded bitter tongues and insincere hearts, like saccharine over-compensations of history’s continual and constant shaming of the dark-skinned woman delivered in the forms of commendation, white-stamped approval into the graces of our current society. But from Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman, to ‘Mammy’, to Lupita Nyong’o, to me, there has been nothing graceful about being a dark-skinned woman and being brewed into a society that undeniably, irrevocably praises whiteness and lightness and good. And there’s certainly nothing graceful about having kind white strangers applauding you for having “such deep and gorgeous skin, oh my!” and being forced to wearily accept these Janus-faced compliments without fuss because you are a dark-skinned black girl and that’s just what you do.
I was about ‘8 and ¾’ years of age and starting the 4th grade when I first realized that it was possible to be too black. This was when I began to hear jokes about myself that just weren’t funny. And hurtful names that just didn’t seem to fit me. And jeers like “Why are you so dark?” and “It’s nighttime…. you blend in!” and “You’re so black, you look like tar!”, and various other iterations of the same principle. And it doesn’t take a genius to know that tar isn’t beauty.
Regrettably, my parents, being the wonderful supporters and self-esteem boosters that they were, failed to prepare me for the inevitable indignity and embarrassment that bearing dark skin as a young black girl would soon entail. As fresh immigrants from Ghana and her coasts, my parents were well-aware of the impacts of colorism and the general shaming of dark skin in their West-African society; embers of British colonialism and its Eurocentric beauty-turned-class-turned-economic standards still burned in the countryside long after the Ghanaian people declared their country’s independence.
And in a weird sense of Stockholm Syndrome, years after gaining “freedom” from her oppressors, Ghana and her people still sought to lighten their skin and chemically straighten their “unmanageable” hair. They would stand for being disenfranchised, disqualified from the irreversibly lightened and straightened society that had reared them, and so they erased. Fortunately, I was able to fix (read: molecularly damage) my hair; correct it so that it no longer bred resistance or fight, no longer appeared “nappy” or “coarse” to the outsider’s gawk and prod. Unfortunately, my skin color was never so lucky. Colorism, self-hate, and a skewed sense of nyctophobia (read: fear of the dark [skinned]) swiftly became engrained facets of the Ghanaian culture, norms that, today, don’t ring far from America and her perennial upholding of whiteness.
In Ghana, people were upfront about how they felt about the tuntum (too dark) people. Mothers would advise their daughters to “brighten” their bodies with alata sɛmina (black soap) so that future suitors wouldn’t be repulsed by their dark elbows or swarthy necks, so that they could be ɛ ye fɛ, beautiful. If euphemisms weren’t enough, fathers would tell their sons that society would reject them if they became too dark, too sun-stained and too earth-baked for the GH₵-exhanging capitalist world to understand. So they bleached. They stayed inside. And they were honest about their self-erasing intentions, they were real with understanding the implications of blackness in a world that has claimed to be “enlightened” (sɔ kanɛa) for so long.
Today, in America, some people (mainly YouTube commenters) also favor the direct approach in addressing “the dark skin problem”, dedicating every dying moment of their lives to being blatantly awful. These people often refer to dark-skinned blacks as “porch monkeys” and “pickaninny Sambos”, constantly wishing for the extinction of “the negroid race” and hoping, and praying, that more and more black boys find themselves 6-inches under as the next Mike Browns, Jordan Davises, and Trayvon Martins. But many Americans like to pretend that differences in skin color don’t exist anymore because we have a (half) black President. In this ‘color-blind America’, “racism is reserved for Red-necks, not for people who don’t see color… like me!” Mainstream America’s special brand of anti-white bigotry is hidden, cloaked by sweet notions of political correctness, and off-beat statements like “I’m not racist but…” and entire weeks devoted to disingenuous sessions of ‘Diversity-Awareness Training’ and it’s just tiring.
To be as clear as the rose-colored sunglasses that Americans wear towards “non-existent!” race relations, I don’t know which attitude I prefer. At least those who are unabashed racists can legitimately acknowledge the significance of my dark-skin and how my 17 years have been shaped as a result of it. Though considerably hateful, these people are at least courageous enough to admit that in 2014 “white is still right”, and see no point in hiding behind the insidious chants of “Look at Lupita, the dark-skinned beauty!” or “I wish my skin were as deep and bold as your skin is!” Horribleness aside, these racists are not subtly patronizing like the rest of the world. They do not seek to save the dark-skinned people from themselves; they do not seek to pity the poor dark-skinned girls into submission.
Last year, for my senior prom, I decided that it would be a fabulous idea to have my makeup done by professionals. When I got to the salon, the makeup artist gazed at me with wonder (like the ogle that people do when they see the lion exhibit at the zoo) and slowly calculated sentences like, “Unfortunately, this salon doesn’t really carry foundations that would match your.. radiant and dazzling skin tone… You see, your type of… mocha skin is just so special and brilliant that it would just be so hard to find a shade that would be as… flawless as the color that you truly are”. When I appeared to be visibly unsettled by the entire situation and everything about the way she formulated her ‘compliment’, she quickly consoled me in a very White Savior-y, Sandra Bullock in 2009’s The Blind Side type of way. “Even though we don’t carry your shade, you should still definitely love the skin that you’re in! It’s… uh, unique!” She smiled as if she had lost the Nobel Peace Prize and was only smiling so that she did not have to look like a sore loser in front of the watching world.
I wanted to laugh because her chagrin was ridiculous and because misplaced comments like that definitively make me adverse to loving “the skin that I’m in”. Comments like that, no matter how painstakingly verbalized or awkwardly uttered, make me feel small. They shrink me into nothing more than an expectation of ‘a strong black woman who don’t need no whiteness’, nothing more than a fad to obsess over (this just in: black is the new black!), and nothing more than a skin color that doesn’t fit the shades of foundation that the white salon in the white suburb of the very white state of Arizona says are white right. I’m a simple girl and for me to truly be comfortable in this world, I think that I sometimes do yearn for some whiteness in my skin (or at least less blackness). I would like to be told that I’m beautiful without my “ethnic and exotic” skin shade being showcased as the focal point that these back-handed compliments are wrapped (read: choked) around. And I actually need for Lupita Nyong’o to be praised for her remarkable acting merit and overall excellence, not for her dark skin that contrasts “ever so beautifully” against the lily-white backdrop of ‘post-racial’ America.
But, alas, due to the many complexities of polygenic inheritance and the DNA of parents that sing the song of Africa and her bitter histories, my skin is the way that it is. I am dark-skinned black girl. And if I want to be honest ’til my soul’s break, I know that I would love and appreciate my dark-skin’s tone if my world would like (or at least tolerate) my not-white, not-pure, and not-blameless skin without pity or without shame. But it doesn’t.
So I don’t.
