On The Colour of My Skin ...

As a person of colour within a Western society, I have always been aware of the components of my being that have made me different to the masses around me. I can recall some of the first moments in my early years where I felt othered.

Ofcourse, there were the clichés. With my complexion being compared to both faeces and dirt, in the early parts of my life, there was a difficulty that I harboured in accepting who I was and the appearance that I had inherited. 

In the later parts of primary school, I suppose it was no longer acceptable for such comments to be made and thus there were no more outright comparisons. Though, that didn't mean that the acknowledgement of my differences stopped. 

In the height of childlike courting, with handmade Valentines and plain declarations of 'love', I would merely watch on the periphery. Now, I can admit that my shyness perhaps contributed to that, yet there is also a part of me that just knows that the colour on my skin was also a deciding factor. The thought of someone liking me was treated as a light joke. The unspoken yet vehement rejections of the idea appeared much more inflamed than they did with any of the other girls. 

At those times, I hadn't really minded. The occasional sting was muffled by the fact that I had no interest in such things either. And perhaps, and it is this that makes my older and wiser heart hurt slightly, I didn't mind because I thought it was rational for white boys to never find a girl of colour attractive. I had thought that it was a given. 

We all have our preferences, that is the inevitable effect of human nature. Though, it occurs to me that from a young age we are somewhat psychologically programmed to find that attraction in people who remind us of ourselves. Who remind us of what we know. And though this appears harmless, the perpetuation of these ideas can fracture the confidence and self belief of many young individuals - especially within a society that praises girls for their beauty before their wit or their intellect. 

The first time I realised that a person of colour could be seen as attractive was when I joined secondary school. Having been the coloured outlier for the vast majority of my life, my entrance into secondary school was almost cinematic. There was something powerful about that change in my social scenery. Being around people who looked like versions of myself, for the first time, instilled a feeling of belonging within my bones. Something that I hadn't had for what had seemed to be an eternity. 

Yet with that came the burst of further insecurities. With this new acknowledgement that people of colour could be deemed pretty, there came a sinking realisation that there were perhaps more flaws that I had embodied other than what I had intially blamed to be the mere tint of my skin. I would pick at my nose, my mouth, my eyes and my hair. My weight or my figure and sometimes, ashamedly, the shade of my complexion.

The latter is of big controversy. With both brands and beauty ideals ingraining the idea that being fair is lovely, many girls struggle with their darker complexions. I consider myself lucky that my relatives have never been advocates of such beliefs. This meant that my dwelling, on this particular part of myself, was fleeting. Yet, it did compel me to reckon with the inner wirings of such a message.

This compulsion to be lighter undeniably stems from the need to succumb to Western beauty ideals. Rather than embracing the rich beauty of such potent colour, women regard it necessary to lighten their skin with creams, make-up and filters. 

I had a really thought provoking discussion with a friend, recently, about the influence of Western beauty ideals on the way we inherently perceive beauty. She had read an interesting study that showed that when observing a selection of people, of a race that is not our own, we instinctively find the individuals that hold features - that agree with Western ideals - to be more attractive. 

What we often fail to see, by remaining compliant with the spread of such beliefs, is that we are telling a large quantity of girls that they are not beautiful, merely because they do not look like someone else. We are telling them that their natural form is something they should strive to separate themselves from. 

The journey of accepting the colour of my skin is best described in separate stages. The first thing that I needed to accept was that I was not any less deserving of love and affection because of the pigment of my body. I had to acknowledge that I had the same capacity to be beautiful as the girls that I had grown up alongside. 

From there, my progression moved me to become confident in the richness of my colour. To revel in how beautifully it is complimented by gold, saffron and other colours of such vivacity. It was here that the complete rejection of Western beauty ideals was warranted. 

The last point of this journey is a place that I still find myself in. It is the utter rejection of any voice that tells me what I must be to be beautiful. It is the dismissal of the idea that beauty can only be attributed to an individual's physicality. Beauty is a societal construct and we must not let it become anything more than that. We must not let it tell us how we should view, not only ourselves, but others. And we must not let it influence the way we value the separate components of who we are.

It seems apparent to me that in order to live as my own, I have to be one with my own. And with the acknowledgement that there is an enrapturing beauty in almost everything, that is what I intend to become.