I couldn’t help but wonder how many women are still holding space for that little girl who was told that she wasn’t pretty enough.
I was first made aware that I wasn’t living up to pretty girl standards by a fellow classmate around first grade. It was picture day and, in the fashion of traditional Black mamas everywhere for a special occasion, my hair had been hot combed straight. A switch-up from the pigtails I regularly sported. I also had on an uncomfortable dress which I absolutely detested. A tomboy by nature, had I not been self-conscious already, my discomfort was exacerbated when a boy came up and started staring at me.
"What?” I asked.
“Why don’t you always look like this?” he said.
“Like what?” I asked again, annoyed.
“Today you look pretty. You don’t always look like this,” he concluded.
I was young but I wasn’t stupid.
By deductive reasoning, if on that day I looked pretty, but usually I didn’t, then usually I must be ugly? I didn’t respond and thought about it. If to be pretty meant that I always had to wear my Sunday’s best and to have my hair straightened, then it would be an impossibility for me to be pretty by those measurements even if I wanted to (which I didn’t). That level of feminineness was reserved for important events. Little girls didn’t need to keep their hair down, I thought. Plus, I wasn’t about to take advice from someone I could smoke in the 40-yard dash.
That said, I was fortunate enough to not take much stock in the particular comment. It wouldn’t be the first time I was questioned for not appropriately performing “attractive femininity” while young. But the experience opened my eyes to my other girl classmates who silently navigated jabs about their appearance, often. The ones who looked forward like they didn’t hear them.
This anecdote highlights the hypocritical, duality Black girls are reared in.
They are expected to be pretty but not “grown.” Both feminine and distinctly gendered but also invisible. Black girls are overwhelming targets of adultification, being seen as adults instead of children, according to Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality. Even Blue Ivy Carter, one of the most famous and wealthy child stars in the world, hasn't been spared criticisms for simply being a little girl with little girl hair. In 2014, internet commentators, agitated that the 2-year-old's hair was not laid for the gods, cruelly began an online petition to "comb her hair." Per usual, the Carters got the last laugh when Blue Ivy was seen years later with a healthy, thick natural unbothered mane of curls.
The mixed signals on how Black girls should look and act fall squarely in-line with the treatment of the "Who Can I Run To?" singers. Xscape had been performing since they were children, three of the members were minors when they were signed, and the oldest member was 21 even during Biggie’s sexually-laced diss track. What exactly had people been saying to and about the young women before that?
