I always thought my skin was too dark. Well actually not always. I did not think I was too dark until about middle school when a little boy asked if my mom had left me in the oven for too long. It’s okay, you can laugh. For a while I did too. You see, everything is funny when everyone is laughing, but things seemingly became a lot less funny when I was alone. I was left with just me, and my reflection.
Freshman year was when the jokes that I used to laugh along with started to sting. My skin was no longer a class joke or lunch table chuckle but it was the burden I carried. I was told told I was not datable because I was too dark and that their “mom wouldn’t mind but their dad would.” Ruefully, it was not because I was Black but because I was dark. Apparently having lighter skin always correlated with being mixed or having Irish in your blood. I don’t know. All I knew was that my DNA had failed me and my skin definitely couldn’t hide the fact that I was surely, undoubtedly, one hundred percent Black.
“You MUST be mixed with something, there is no way you could be just Black,” was what my friend was told one day at lunch, simply because she happened to be of a lighter complexion. It was as if to be African American you had to have skin like the night, and a nose as broad as the sea; as if having those characteristics were not special or wrong.
Freshman year I spent a lot of time in the mirror, day dreaming of what it would be like to have long curly hair and be a lighter Black girl. The “right” kind of Black girl. Although I was a freshman in highschool, I still could not understand the concept of making judgements based off someone’s skin. “Why don’t people just get to know people?” I asked my mom.
“I do not know ” she always seemed to respond. No one ever seemed to know the answers to the questions I had, and it seemed like the more my questions went unanswered, the angrier I got. Broken mirrors were replaced with new ones all the way up through my senior year of highschool.
The broadcasts of jokes about my skin had stopped and I had stopped daydreaming in mirrors.The thing about judging someone is that physical attributes are only one way to make assumptions. I can think back to that day I was in the hallway at my locker, talking to some of my friends from the period before.
I preceded to cackle from a joke that was made following a funny meme my friend had showed me. My voice echoed down the halls and happened to summon a guy I knew, who was mutual friends of the people I was standing with. He walked over and smirked, staring at me for a few minutes and listened to me talk before he said what he said.
“Yo you sound White as hell”
“Huh?”
Confused, all I could do was let out a stiff laugh to clear the air of awkwardness.
But to my surprise, as soon as he said that, all my friends joined in agreement. They began to declare their reasons for why the way I laughed, talked, and carried myself was as of another race other than my own. The years of high school I spent attempting to embrace my “Black culture” seemed to fade away in that distinct moment. I traded my Converses in for Timbs back in my sophomore year, embracing the burden of my skin that everyone around me seemed to think I had.
I had cracked. Hiding my exterior self seemed to awaken me more within. Now I’m being told that, although I look Black, I don’t sound it. I went from being too black to not being Black enough. It felt like i was climbing this huge mountain and when I finally reached the pinnacle, just when I just started to feel the breeze and see the beauty of all that was around me, I would reach up to grab that last bit of rock and would stretch, and stretch, but still couldn’t reach it.
Fast forward to college.
You see, I wish I could give you a Disney ending, or that I’ve found, the potion, or antidote for my disease. That the solution to my problem was in a book or online. I wish I could tell you that one day all of my insecurities vanished and that I was made whole, but this is a mountain that I am still climbing.
I now understand that the power of who I am lies not within others, but within who I say I am. My experiences can now encourage or relate to someone else, and to me, that’s the most significant solution there is. I can tell a little Black girl, or boy, who’s facing similar discrepancies, that when they look in the mirror they have the ability to see themselves as THEY would want and not how others perceive them as.
The way I see myself when I look in the mirror gives me hope that one day the world will see me as I deserve to be seen. Believing is one thing, but training your mind to put those beliefs into action is another. I believe that my black is beautiful and I will take it day by day until I can truly live what I believe.
