Beauty is (white) skin deep

When I was a teenager, I defined beauty as everything that I wasn’t. In my mind, the lighter your hair and eyes, the more beautiful you were. I don’t know where that idea came from or when it finally and thankfully left my head, but my point is this: For more than half my life, I believed my dark hair and eyes made me hopelessly ugly. I was actually envious of the members of Hanson because they were prettier than me.

While I was in Bible college, I helped teach children’s church for fourth grade girls who rode the bus to church. Most of these girls were black or Hispanic. One day, a black girl reached out, grabbed part of my hair and asked me, “How do you get your hair so smooth?”

“That’s just how my hair is,” I told her. I didn’t know what else to say. But her question made me realize how many girls are out there walking around with the same mentality that I had: That they’re hopelessly unpretty because of who they are.

According to psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, science supports this little girl’s mentality. In Psychology Today, Kanazawa posted the results of a study that he claims measures physical attractiveness both objectively and subjectively. According to the people he interviewed, black women just aren’t as attractive as women of other races. Kanazawa points out that black men and women in general rated themselves as being more attractive than other respondents rated them to be. That point especially makes me question the point of the study. If a woman is comfortable with how she looks, should it matter to her if most other people don’t find her attractive? Considering that Kanazawa’s article doesn’t say anything about the gender or racial make up of the group interviewed, he’s hardly proven that most people don’t find black women attractive anyway. (Since I published the original post, Psychology Today took down the original article, but it is still available here.)

What bothers me about Kanazawa’s article is that it reinforces a message that black children, especially girls, already hear from society ad nauseum: That they’re not quite as pretty or important. A skit from the first season of “In Living Color,” performed by T’Keyah Crystal Keymah, touches upon the places that black girls receive these messages from.

The skit is reminiscent of Gilda Radner’s “The Judy Miller Show,” a bit Radner performed both on Saturday Night Live and in solo shows. Although both of these sketches are from comedy programs, I find it depressing to compare the content Keymah’s performance to that in Radner’s.