When I was a little kid, I wasn’t aware of how I stood out compared to the other kids. In the sea of my white classmates, my natural hair and darker complexion set me apart from the rest. I understood that I looked different, but it did not give me discomfort. In fact, I loved my blackness. I loved how my skin darkened into a deep, warm brown after hours of playing in the summer sun. I loved how my hair was big and curly and could do all kinds of hairstyles, especially with a colorful set of bobble hair ties. I loved my brown eyes and my plump lips. When I was 7 years old, my blackness made me different. It made me special.

Then I became all too aware. In fourth grade, kids began to have crushes and actually cared about who gave them a Scooby-Doo Valentine’s Day card during lunch. From then on, I became more and more conscious of my appearance and how my race ultimately was factored into my attractiveness.

I noticed that I had put on weight and I aspired to be thin like the white girls in class. I noticed that kids complimented my hair when it was pressed and began to beg my mom to take me to the hair salon more often even though they always burned my scalp very badly. I began to think blue eyes were prettier than brown eyes. And I noticed that my classmates often commented on how my older sisters with complexions lighter than mine were so beautiful.

It was not a conscious decision, but I somehow chose to admire white features. I no longer cherished my blackness, but constantly attempted to hide parts of it. And I grew tremendously disappointed when I couldn’t change who I was and how I looked. I couldn’t be thin with blue eyes, straight, silky hair and an aquiline nose. I was stuck with what I had.

As I grew older I sort of thinned out, however, I remained curvier than most girls. I thought that boys might notice me more, but nothing changed. What was wrong about me? Yes, I wished I could change my appearance like most teenagers. But it absorbed my thoughts. I devalued myself on a daily basis, telling myself that I could never be good enough. I felt so invisible compared to white girls.

Then marked a turning point in how I viewed myself. It was sophomore year of high school. I was riding on the bus home from school and talking to some kids when a white guy paused, looked me deeply in the face for a good minute and proceeded to say, “You’d be prettier if you were white.”

My immediate response was “What the f*** is wrong with you?” Suddenly, the “happy-go-lucky” girl most people viewed me as turned hideous with rage, and the guy told me to calm down and that he was just joking.

But he wasn’t. I knew he wasn’t. No matter how much he pleaded with me that it was all just silly words, his hurtful rhetoric had finally answered what was so “wrong” with me. I was black. And black is not considered beautiful to most.

I finally snapped out of my five-year-long pity party of me allowing myself to think I wasn’t beautiful and realized that the problem wasn’t me. It was everyone else.

My big lips and curves could not be considered beautiful unless donned by a white body. I finally realized the truth then, at 15, that I had been taught from such a young age — that the world around me did not see black as beautiful, but as a disfigurement. I didn’t fully understand why that was then, that our society had conditioned us into thinking blackness was valueless through white-washed movies and magazine covers and dead black bodies on the 11 o’clock news. But I accepted it as a fact of life. And I understood that it was wrong. I knew that my spirit and my physical features were full of value.

I was a smart, funny, caring, talented girl with big ambitions I knew I would someday accomplish. I had beautiful brown skin, a wild mane and a contagious smile. I told myself this with pride. I told humility to go to hell for a while because I needed time to heal from years of devaluing myself. This became my mantra.

I quickly grew not to care. Okay, so everyone around me seemed to only go for white girls. My response? “They’re just missing out. That’s their problem.” And so I learned not to let society’s racist beauty ideals dismantle my self-worth.

Looking back I realized I never really wanted to be white. I didn’t want to be chased after or put on some pedestal like the white girls I saw. I just wanted my beauty to be acknowledged. I wanted to be seen as beautiful not by comparison, but beautiful just because I was.

This is where I stand today. I’ve grown to love myself for who I am. But the feeling of unacceptance still hurts. The words “you’d be prettier if you were white” still deeply upset me. They represent a culture that devalues black bodies and admires black features only on white canvases. A society that raises black girls to devalue themselves and not love themselves for how they are, both body and mind. A country that perpetuates a system of oppression by telling our girls that they cannot be loved in their natural form or good enough to achieve what they want to achieve. A system that breaks us down when we are young by taking away our self-worth so that we constantly limit what we can do and who we can be. And it all starts with telling them they aren’t beautiful.

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