Perfect for this last day of Black History Month. Black is beautiful.
I want to take this opportunity to talk about beauty, Black beauty,
dark beauty. I received a letter from a girl and I’d like to share just a
small part of it with you: "Dear Lupita," it reads, "I think you’re
really lucky to be this Black but yet this successful in Hollywood
overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to
lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me."
My heart bled a little when I read those words, I could never have
guessed that my first job out of school would be so powerful in and of
itself and that it would propel me to be such an image of hope in the
same way that the women of The Color Purple were to me.
I
remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only
saw pale skin, I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And
my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up
lighter-skinned. The morning would come and I would be so excited about
seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I
was in front of a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first. And
every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark
as I was the day before. I tried to negotiate with God, I told him I
would stop stealing sugar cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted, I
would listen to my mother's every word and never lose my school sweater
again if he just made me a little lighter. But I guess God was
unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He never listened.
And when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse, as you can imagine
happens with adolescence. My mother reminded me often that she thought
that I was beautiful but that was no conservation, she’s my mother, of
course she’s supposed to think I am beautiful. And then Alek Wek came on
the international scene. A celebrated model, she was dark as night, she
was on all of the runways and in every magazine and everyone was
talking about how beautiful she was. Even Oprah called her beautiful and
that made it a fact. I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a
woman who looked so much like me, as beautiful. My complexion had always
been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden Oprah was telling me
it wasn’t. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had
begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help
but bloom inside of me, when I saw Alek I inadvertently saw a reflection
of myself that I could not deny. Now, I had a spring in my step because
I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of
beauty. But around me the preference for light skin prevailed, to the
beholders that I thought mattered I was still unbeautiful. And my mother
again would say to me you can’t eat beauty, it doesn’t feed you and
these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really understand them
until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could
acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.
And what my mother meant when she said you can’t eat beauty was that you
can’t rely on how you look to sustain you. What is fundamentally
beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you. That kind
of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul. It is what got
Patsey in so much trouble with her master, but it is also what has kept
her story alive to this day. We remember the beauty of her spirit even
after the beauty of her body has faded away.
And so I hope
that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you,
young girl, on a similar journey. That you will feel the validation of
your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being
beautiful inside, that there is no shade in that beauty.
"If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine."---Morris West
"I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being." ~Hafiz of Shiraz
My favorites from the Parade of Nations:
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
