On Having Dark Skin and Desiring Beauty

image by Toni Smalls

I want to be beautiful, the type of beautiful that makes poets wax lyrical about the mist from a rushing waterfall or how the sunset dims in my wake. I’m sure most people would agree—who doesn’t want to be desired? But what is beauty? All I know for sure is what I’ve been conditioned to think it’s not. Like most modern American societal ideas, much of our conceptualization of what beauty isn’t is informed by violent anti-blackness that traces back to slavery. We know that beauty isn’t fatness, and it isn’t darkness, and we know that our condemnation of these things finds its origins in anti-blackness and racism.

Our beliefs about beauty aren’t hugely separated from our beliefs about humanity. And to have humanness implies that some people aren’t human, but other, which leads us to ask ourselves who is human and who is ‘other’? In the West, whiteness is what’s human, and everything else exists in its proximity to Whiteness.

Beauty is intersubjective, a sociopolitical construct of sorts. Really, it only exists in its oppositionality to ugliness. That’s the good news. If you think you’re hideously ugly, you’re probably not—it’s just, if beauty exists on a scale where beautiful is the top, somebody has to fall on the bottom half. I don’t think the concept of beauty is purely a societal creation, but I do think that, as a society, we’re constantly recreating it in ways that serve the same oppressive structures that maintain our society.

It doesn’t feel enough to merely denounce societal ideals of beauty as nonexistent, because the act of denouncing it suggests that it does still somehow exist. It doesn’t feel enough to say that beauty is “only skin deep,” or “in the eye of the beholder,” anymore. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what about when that same eye has been informed and conditioned by harmful gazes for centuries?

Beauty cannot exist without ugliness the same way white people did not exist before black people did, the same way nothing makes a man apart from him being not a woman. In The Power, Naomi Alderman writes that “Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow, Look under the shells: it’s not there.”

I’d argue the same about beauty. There’s very little underneath the shells. And if beauty is whiteness, if beauty is attained by measuring your proximity to whiteness—where on the scale does that leave people who look like me, a dark-skinned Black girl?

It’s very real that lighter skinned people have privilege and increased mobility in society. Even in countries where white people are by far the minority, colonialism has ensured that whiteness is lauded as beautiful. In Nigeria, 77% of women use cosmetic products that promote skin lightening. India’s famous Bollywood movie scene faces constant criticism over the lighter skinned actors that lead their films not representing the other faces of the country.

Here at home in the U.S. dark-skinned Black women are 30% more likely to be arrested than our lighter counterparts. Dark-skin girls are more likely to be suspended from school and more likely to not be hired for jobs. Being darker skinned colors your experiences with specific shades of violence.

And yet, issues of colorism are constantly diminished as simply “preferences.” Colorism is reduced to physical attraction, and physical attraction is reduced to being something inherent. The livelihoods of dark-skinned women are threatened daily, and yet the discourse about colorism centers notions of “pretty privilege” or gross yearnings for “mixed babies.” Colorism is more sinister than it wants you to think.

Our definitions of beauty are so rooted in ideas of whiteness that when we do see a black woman praised as beautiful in mainstream media, it’s often said that it’s because of her “eurocentric features” — which is to say that when a black woman is beautiful, it’s only because her beauty in some ways belongs to Europe. How can a black woman's features even be “eurocentric?” And why does this term only ever come up after she’s considered beautiful?

A minute of any type of logical reasoning makes it clear that colorism is not rooted in any sort of intrinsic behavior at all.

But what does it mean to know that beauty is a construct... And still yearn to be beautiful?

The danger of coveting beauty (for me, a dark skinned Black girl in modern America) is that beauty finally feels like something I could actually achieve. Women who look like me are being pushed to the front of all sorts of media in the name of diversity, lately. Beauty feels accessible, for once.

Accessible, but also conditional. It feels as though they’re saying, “We love you, but only as a result of featurism or your willingness to subscribe to respectability politics.” Performative acts of recognition feel almost as bad as a lack of recognition. Black women, dark Black women have existed before the media decided to acknowledge we did, and we’ll exist afterwards, too.

Like any act of unlearning the things we’ve been conditioned to believe as true, it’s extremely difficult, interpersonal work to leave Western standards of beauty behind. Decolonizing one’s mind is no overnight feat. It’s hard to give up the desire for desirability, to ignore the allure of being conventionally alluring. But Black beauty can exist outside of the white gaze, and it’s imperative that it must—your happiness is stunted when you’re caught up in the endless tournament that is reaching to comply with beauty standards.

I have heard every joke about dark-skinned women as monkeys. I have read every comment—simultaneously subscribing to misogynoir and transphobia—asserting that dark-skinned women are manly. I have seen every preference for fair-skinned women presented as valid and separate from colorism. I’ve quietly noticed that dainty adjectives like fair are what light-skinned women are called in the first place. I have internalized every wish from people hoping to have children with so-called nice hair and nice eyes and lightskin. I have noted every dating app profile asking for lightskins only. I have scrolled through every hateful comment section after a woman the same color as me has gone viral on social media. I have remembered every relative that has handed me bleaching lotion, or hair relaxer. I remember those times I was pulled out from under the warmth of the sun.

I carry these things with me to every new location, at every glance in the mirror, during every introduction.

Still, I want to be beautiful.

It’s simply not fair to darker skinned Black and brown women to base our worthiness off of how closely we compare to white beauty standards. And it’s not fair to the lighter-skinned women who belong to these groups, either. Beauty, of course, is more nuanced and complicated than I could ever analyze into one essay or cram under one single definition. But I know what it’s not. And I know that whatever it is, dark-skinned girls deserve to own it, too.

Beauty as it exists sociopolitically is nowhere. When we limit our perception of what is lovely to only what we’re told is lovely, we’re cheating ourselves—we’re missing out on a lot of love. Because beauty as it is really, is everywhere: in the soft rainbow mist of a rushing waterfall, the sky dimming and brightening as the sun herself models beauty. It is in every single inch of skin that glows blue under the night sky.