Goodman Grey
12-07-2020, 12:11 PM
13198
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/so-ugly-with-your-kinky-hair-the-terror-of-the-flat-iron/41805/
I remember the day my stunning oldest sister came home in tears because this was what her classmates — and teacher — had called her. I was 6 years old at the time. My sister was 13. In home economics that afternoon in Roseville, Minnesota, beauty consultants had come in to teach my sister and her classmates how to do makeup — something fundamentally problematic in itself — and none of the available colors matched my oldest sister’s skin tone. We are Lupita Nyong’o black, not the lightened skin tone represented in the media because its proximity to whiteness is socially accepted as attractive — the kind that is so pale it can be mistaken for a tan. (See: Rashida Jones on the red carpet.)
On my sister’s black skin, they put pressed powder fit for a light-skinned European — eye shadow, blush and lipstick to match. This was in the 1980s — long before Lupita Nyong’o’s 2014 Lancôme deal or even Halle Berry’s Revlon contract, in 1996. It was still possible to walk into a store and not see any cosmetics that could be used on dark-skinned black women. The beauty consultants tried to style my older sister’s little Afro and then gave up, saying it was impossible. They laughed at her. The other home ec students laughed at her. My sister sat in the corner and cried, her tears blurring the makeup, while the rest of the class finished receiving their makeovers. “I looked,” my sister told me when she stopped crying, “like a clown.”
"I looked like a clown." :lmao
Shortly after this incident, the school district told my parents that something “needed to be done” with our hair. Wearing it in the short natural Afros that were the norm in my parents’ villages back in Uganda would not be accepted. Your daughters look too much like boys, they were told. It was too confusing to tell the difference. Our hair must be straightened, they said, or we would have to find a different place to learn.
I was not born thinking black was ugly. But by the end of elementary school I understood my blackness as ugly.
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/so-ugly-with-your-kinky-hair-the-terror-of-the-flat-iron/41805/
I remember the day my stunning oldest sister came home in tears because this was what her classmates — and teacher — had called her. I was 6 years old at the time. My sister was 13. In home economics that afternoon in Roseville, Minnesota, beauty consultants had come in to teach my sister and her classmates how to do makeup — something fundamentally problematic in itself — and none of the available colors matched my oldest sister’s skin tone. We are Lupita Nyong’o black, not the lightened skin tone represented in the media because its proximity to whiteness is socially accepted as attractive — the kind that is so pale it can be mistaken for a tan. (See: Rashida Jones on the red carpet.)
On my sister’s black skin, they put pressed powder fit for a light-skinned European — eye shadow, blush and lipstick to match. This was in the 1980s — long before Lupita Nyong’o’s 2014 Lancôme deal or even Halle Berry’s Revlon contract, in 1996. It was still possible to walk into a store and not see any cosmetics that could be used on dark-skinned black women. The beauty consultants tried to style my older sister’s little Afro and then gave up, saying it was impossible. They laughed at her. The other home ec students laughed at her. My sister sat in the corner and cried, her tears blurring the makeup, while the rest of the class finished receiving their makeovers. “I looked,” my sister told me when she stopped crying, “like a clown.”
"I looked like a clown." :lmao
Shortly after this incident, the school district told my parents that something “needed to be done” with our hair. Wearing it in the short natural Afros that were the norm in my parents’ villages back in Uganda would not be accepted. Your daughters look too much like boys, they were told. It was too confusing to tell the difference. Our hair must be straightened, they said, or we would have to find a different place to learn.
I was not born thinking black was ugly. But by the end of elementary school I understood my blackness as ugly.