The Raw Truth about
Black Beauty
By Margot Cornelius, 03.01.07
Dawn Royster hated school picture day. She couldn’t use the comb they gave out to comb her hair. She had braids, so she combed their ends instead. She wanted so badly to run that comb through long, straight, silky hair and then push it behind her ears - like the white girls.
Looking back, 37-year-old Royster doesn’t know how she made it through those early years as one of the only African-American girls in her white neighborhood. Trying to aspire to a standard of beauty she was not born to perpetuate, Royster’s coming-of-age story echoes that of many African-American girls involves. It involves a tussle with prejudice and typecasting not only by those outside of their race but from within too.
“The white kids called me ‘nigger’ and the black kids called me ‘Oreo, zebra, newspaper,’” she remembers. “I never wished I wasn’t black when they [white kids] called me ‘nigger.’ The black kids saying it hurt so much.”
The issues dealt with are some of the issues the short film, "A Girl Like Me" tackles in eight spell-binding minutes. The director, a 17-year-old New Yorker named Kiri Davis, interviews African-American girls at her high school about the standards of beauty they feel are imposed on them. In their struggle to either conform or rebel, the girls run through a list of criteria they feel they need to abide by in order to be seen as beautiful. Top on the list is hair – it must be relaxed or permed, straight and preferably blonde. “Bad hair” is hair that is “kinky,” “natural” or “African,” as one girl said her mom calls it. Being light-skinned is seen as pretty and dark skin can be fixed by bleaching.
Davis’ film also reconducts a doll test. Initially conducted in the 1940’s to determine to effects of segregation on African-American children, a black doll and a white doll were placed in front of a child. They were asked to choose which one is better. After nearly 60 years, the results were the same.
Fifteen out of the 20 black children in the film reached for the white doll as the “better” or “pretty” doll. The film, which is spreading quickly across the Internet, has rekindled interest in the debate.
“I was surprised because nothing’s changed in 50 years. But then again, why would it have changed? We have racism in our own race,” said Kimberly Nimox, a single African-American mother of two. “Sometimes I feel that if you grew up in an all-black community and there was no white people…we would still feel the same way with a white-skinned doll and a dark-skinned doll.”
Even at the age of 11, Nimox’s daughter feels that her naturally curly hair is not good enough. She wants it straight, but her mom is not in agreement with any of those thoughts.
“I won’t put anything in her hair at this time because I want her to be comfortable with her own hair texture and within her own skin,” Nimox said.
While the issue might seem to center around superficial attributes such as hair texture and skin color, the scope of the damage on the minds of African-American girls is far-reaching.
“When I was little my mom bought me a black baby doll for Christmas. I hated her because she was black," Royster recalled. " I used to put her in a carriage and shove her in a kitchen door. One final day I pushed her carriage down the hill outside our house. I wanted her gone."
Twenty-seven year old Kia Matthews has decided to confront the standard head on. She’s taken a razor to her head and shaved off all her curls.
"My own mother didn’t acknowledge that I was attractive until I was forced to perm [straighten] my hair at the age of nine,” Matthews said.
The cycle has been set in motion, and the “standard” continues to pass from one generation of African-American women to the next like an unwanted heirloom . Hurting black girls mature into hurting black women.
“Unless you are self-conscious of the cycle you are creating for your children over and over again, it will take generations to come to break the cycle," Nimox said. "Here it’s been 50 years and the cycle hasn’t been broken yet. We still have little girls who say, ‘white is better, black is ugly.’”
In order to start changing the perceptions held by African-American girls, Matthews wants to gvie them some advice.
"I would show them that there are many different versions of physical beauty and no one is better than the other," Matthews said.
