Despite the music and boasting Michelle Obama as first lady, a woman admired for her beauty, scores of brown-skinned black girls are still being emotionally battered for not being light-skinned.
“When I play with dolls, I play with the lighter dolls because I think the dark ones are ugly [and] they look like me,” 10-year-old Pearl said on the Tyra Show. “I wish I was light-skinned so that more boys would give me compliments. When I walk in school, no one gives me compliments. They make me feel that [dark-skinned] black people are ugly.”
Pearl’s brown-skinned mother broke down crying on the show because her daughter told Tyra Banks that she wanted to have her skin lightened in order to feel more pretty.
“When I hear her say that, it makes me think that I didn’t do a good enough job as a mother,” she said as her voice cracked and tears streamed down her bronze-tinted cheeks. “When I was young, I didn’t like myself. But I didn’t think that the same issue would be going on today. And I said [to her daughter], ‘Pearl, you really need to love yourself.’ Don’t I tell you that all the time? ‘No matter what people say, you have to love you.’ “
Tyra, who battled her own insecurities growing up, particularly as it pertained to being nonwhite, seemed baffled by the continuing issue, especially in this age of successful, attractive women with cafe au lait skin like Michelle Obama, Gabrielle Union, Regina King and men such as Michael Jordan, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson and Morris Chestnut.
“It’s my mission in life to expand what beautiful is for young girls,” said Tyra, who then turned her attention to Pearl, “because you are [like] me and so many other young girls who grow up and don’t see an image of themselves. Beauty isn’t one cookie-cutter [image]. It isn’t one stereotype. But if all she [Pearl] sees is Beyonce and Rihanna and me as one type of beauty in the black community, it says to her that she isn’t beautiful.”
Banks hugged the insecure girl before declaring that the perceived parameters of beauty are ridiculously narrow.
“I’m so happy that Michelle Obama is our first lady and she’s a fashion icon and she’s a beautiful woman, because it’s going to make your [to Pearl’s mother] daughter feel better about herself. And the Gabrielle Unions of the world … we need more of that. There’s a model named Jessica White. She’s got a Maybelline contract,” Tyra said, adding that two of her contestants on America’s Next Top Model are brown-skinned women. “But enough people don’t know about that. Still, the prevailing look of beauty is the light-skinned, light-eyed girl. You have to know that you’re beautiful.” –terry shropshire
