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To be born Black is a blessing and a burden.
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A blessing because, oh, the community and culture we’ve created.
Dark-skinned women are criminalized and jailed at a higher rate.
Dark-skinned women have historically been either underrepresented or represented in the form of harmful stereotypes in film and TV.
Sylvie Rosokoff
They will never capture the burden of performance and perfection that this structuralcolorismdemands.
Is there a study that can quantify the pain, the exhaustion, of that experience?
Red or pink lipstick was garish.
The only colors that worked for us were dark berries and browns.
It was important to always look “together,” palatable and unassuming, especially in professional prefs.
Keep your hair laid, edges tamed.
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Flawless, unblemished skin was a must, the only saving grace of a deep complexion.
I knew, even as a young girl, that they were ridiculous.
My daily uniform became a single set of stained pajamas.
Helen L. Collen
My kinky, 4C hair was an uncombed, matted puzzle of tangled strands.
After paying for my items, I made my way to the exit.
The manager of the store, a lighter-skinned Black woman, stopped me.
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“Ma’am, I have to look inside your bag,” she said.
“Do you have anything in your pockets?
yo remove your hood.”
Courtesy of Subject
After she was satisfied I hadn’t stolen anything, I returned the products indignantly and left.
I haven’t walked in those doors since.
It is impossible to know for sure what about me prompted this treatment.
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It made me feel bad.
It made me feel ugly.
You cannot quantify an experience.
It’s a matter of survival.
If we don’t, we face spiritual and physical violence.
I’m thoroughly bored of this punch in of world.
I want to resist it.
Im claiming this for myself too.
Recently, I stopped by a local pharmacy and bought a bright, ruby-red lipstick my first.
I put it on in the store, in sweatpants and slides.
I checked myself out in the display-case mirror chocolate skin with acne scars, short hair with fuzzy edges.
Zeba Blayis a culture and film critic born in Ghana and based in New York City.
“Are you albino or are you just light-skinded?”
I didn’t understand what either of my options meant.
Turns out I was just light-skinded, very light-skinded.
It was a thousand shades of yellow, but I wasn’t a silky, Goldilocks punch in.
My locks were thick, tightly coiled, and dense.
In the value system of Black hair, texture, not color, was the primary commodity.
And mine wasn’t “good” nor was it too “nappy.”
It placed me almost squarely in the middle of the Black girl hair scale.
I was creme with high-yella undertones.
My brother said I was opalescent.
D.C. in the ’70s was a glorious, gushing fountain of Black history, hipness, and beauty.
Back in second grade, I looked up the word “albino” in the encyclopedia and was crushed.
Was I not enough to be gathered among them?
Where was the rest of my melanin?
There was one spectacularly pretty girl at my new school: Ann Philpot.
It was rich and deep and radiant.
Every night I would pray that I would awaken to have lustrous skin like hers.
I prayed to be that kind of Black.
Little Black girls have no space or language to share how much we might admire each other.
How we believe we may be beautiful because we have an array of pigments, like flowers.
She will not be questioned or picked out.
The shade of her flesh will safely place her somewhere near the middle of the Black girl bouquet.
Renisha was 19 years old when she was murdered in 2013.
Elenni was 23 at the time.
My very light skin shields me.
My proximity to whiteness, my small dose of melanin deflects racists' bullets.
There is no such protection for the only person on this Earth I would give my life for.
Now I pray to God for the safety of all unmistakably Black girls.
Most recently, Davis collaborated with Mariah Carey on her best-selling memoir,The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
Growing up I loved beauty, especially makeup.
I knew loud and clear by the time I was 10 years old what the world thought of me.
I walked away devastated.
I felt as if I had been told to walk to the back of the beauty bus.
It was then that beauty’s segregation became clear to me.
It’s why I fight so hard for brands and the industry to change.
As a child I thought I was cursed to be dark-skinned.
I always felt wrong, even once I started my career.
Jobs I was qualified for and was actually already doing were given to women with no beauty experience.
But they were a size 0, with blue eyes and swinging blonde hair.
They fit the image of power that those magazines wanted to exude.
I knew my Blackness would hold me back in that world.
So I became a freelance writer at the age of 23, and never looked back.
I wasn’t prepared to play “Mammy” to anyone’s Scarlett O’Hara.
My daughters are a wonderful mix of me and my husband, who is blond and blue-eyed.
And if I could go back in time?
And you are aspirational."
I’d also tell her to “just hold on.
People will begin to talk about all the invisible, painful things you have felt.
It’s not you.
You are not wrong and you’re not the negative things you’ve been made to feel you are.
When the time comes, raise up your voice and help heal what’s going on.
You will be seen.
You will be heard.”
Ateh Jewelis an award-winning journalist, producer, and director.
