We have wrinkles, freckles, sunspots, stretchmarks, and spider veins. We have curly, wavy, kinky and straight hair that is brown, blond, red, black, and gasp!… grey. We have white, pinkish, brown, yellow, red, and black skin. We are short, medium, and tall. We have bubble butts and flat asses. We all have curves in different places. We are all shapes.
Yet you see people trying to tan their lighter skin darker. We airbrush dark skin lighter. We spend a fortune on highlights, foils, and dyes. We have a $40 billion plus diet industry, a $20 billion cosmetic, and a $12 billion cosmetic procedure industry (both surgical and nonsurgical.)
We just never seem satisfied with the bodies that we have. We are constantly trying to lose a pound, workout more, or save money for products that smooth, define, or promise miracles in a bottle. What about self-acceptance? What about encouraging all people to love their organic beautiful selves?
We have one life to live and one body to live it in so we mind as well learn how to love it.
So let’s appreciate our bodies and each others bodies. Let’s celebrate all the colors, shapes, and textures that make up this beautiful world we live in!
I found the article below by Debra J. Dickerson. She is a political activist and author of The End Of Blackness. Her work appears in The New Republic, The Washington Post, Talk, Slate, Salon, Essence, and Vibe, and has been featured in Best American Essays. She has also won the New York Association of Black Journalists’ first-place award for personal commentary.
Black (and Brown) Can Only Be Just So Beautiful
Kim Kardashian got airbrushed lighter, smoother, and thinner for a photo shoot. Happens every day in Hollywood, I know. I don’t know if she was in on it, but I know I wasn’t when it happened to me.
A while back, my hairdresser asked me to be photographed for a black hair magazine. Trust me: we sisters LUV those things. I was beyond psyched. Until I saw the photos. I threw the magazine away in disgust, so I can’t show it to you, but they’d airbrushed me at least five shades lighter and gave me gray eyes. Gray!
This was a totally black-run operation. They wanted my kinky hair (checks my twists on this page), but not my actual blackness. How pathetic.
When I first started doing TV, the makeup chicks (I’ve rarely had a non-white one) would cagily, carefully, ask me questions about what kind of foundation I wanted. “Whatever matches…?” Were these trick questions?
I figured there was something special about being made up for TV that a newbie like me just wasn’t hip to. Finally, when they figured out that I wasn’t going to go off, they told me that often blacks wanted to be made as light as possible. You’d be amazed at some of the names, but I ain’t going there.
Pathetic.
Here’s the Kim Kardashian:
[…] people might think that the African American girls and the Latina girls steer clear of such practices. Nope. If you think it’s only the Caucasian girls you’d be […]
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