Unraveling Colourism’s Hold

I was an ugly girl. Mainly, I agreed I was one because I didn’t believe people lied about ugly.  People might lie and tell you that you look good, or they make like you enough that this colors their vision of you and thus, renders you pretty to them.  But people usually call ugly as they see it fit to do so. I presumed that people were either incredibly mean, or they feel justified enough to point out some ugly in this world. Most likely, a combination of the two takes place. So, if enough people say it—even one would be enough—it must be true.

And who would call someone ugly anyway? Within fairy tales, where the swarthy duckling pays its dues and becomes the swan, the evil remain mottled, warted, ugly. It’s an awful label to bear, but for many dark-skinned, “greng-greng”-speckled-hairline-having black girls of the Caribbean, this is what we learn and have to unlearn, or it seeps into your being and nests on your inside.^[i] Several of my black West Indian girlfriends have stories they’ve shared: rejections and hurtful comments that remain with them from childhood and their teen or early adult years, both from inside the family and outside.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words do matter and they certainly do hurt; Shabba Ranks, calypsonian Brigo and other (in)famously ugly folk might also agree with this.^[ii] Neither man is ugly, but both are dark-skinned, African descent men whose looks have been widely dissed locally and abroad. If you have never been called ugly and had someone look at you with a kind of annoyance bordering on disgust, as though your very existence offends them—then you will not know what I mean.

Reggae singjay Chronixx (Jamar McNaughton), observes on “Black is Beautiful” how “they never told us, black is beauty”, and asserts that “you need to hear about beautiful black things ‘cause/Most time we hear about black, we hear about black magic and black witches.”^[iii] Chronixx urges a refutation of the destructive ideas which are ingested about the word that we use to ascribe identity and cultural value: black. This negative word association contributes to internalized anti-blackness which is self-sustained from the outside in, manifesting in widespread cultural patterns of preferring white features, or near-white, or brown, or not-quite-full-black. Notions of beauty are continuously fed by our histories of colonialism, racism, chattel slavery and indentureship which all help shape an individual’s ideas about their own blackness as well as that of others. At the risk of being confined to Rastafari’s images of blackness bound by biblical order, royal male supremacy and female respectability, I am contemplating how Chronixx and I have similar concerns, on this record at least, through my personal, gendered experiences.    

To paraphrase a Barbadian woman friend of mine, ‘you learn a lot about a country when you grow up very dark skinned in it.’ There is an underbelly you get exposed to when you understand that people do not value your looks compared to others, and this thinking exists in the generation before you and the next; people will also tell you how you get too fat or stay too slim or your eyes or head too big because Caribbean people will talk their mind, or throw vicious picong.^[iv] You will not request it, but you will be ranked and cruelly dissected anyway.

Women live this repeatedly; people will rate others and extend them opportunities, kindness and human courtesy because of skin colour and looks. And because people are taught to value women and girls for their beauty inside most societies, unattractive women become disposable and are subject to particular kinds of verbal abuse and emotional violence. Women and girls with prominent birthmarks, who are fat, or differently abled, with wide noses, who deviate from prescribed beauty norms will learn and, who don’t learn will feel. Oftentimes, in a hierarchy of so-called preferences, dark-skinned black women come last. In secondary school, my religious studies instructor once advised me not to question God’s handiwork. Quibbling over looks seemed especially frivolous to her, a devout, brown-skinned, curly-haired Catholic woman; she didn’t understand the tears, the emotional anguish, the words weaponized like cutlass blades.

Soca performer Nadia Batson, in an interview, noted how colourism and sizeism impacted her life, where “people used to tell me I was too dark, too fat” to the extent that “all those comments messed me up for many years to the point that it affected by self-esteem.”^[v] Blaxx (Dexter Stewart) meanwhile, eventually felt empowered by his melanin enough to use colour as a sobriquet. As the Trinidad Guardian described, “‘It wasn’t easy for me to become a soca artiste. People say you have a good voice but you aren’t marketable; you’re fat, they had a problem with the skin colour,’ he says. It is the same dark skin colour that inspired his moniker–Blaxx.”^[vi]

If you are Indo-Caribbean and dark, Indianness can be leveraged preferentially against blackness, and so can straighter hair and longer hair against coiled-up, nappy hair; dark douglas can leverage mixedness and diluted blackness; with anti-blackness, there is always someone darker to be pitted against comparatively.^[vii] Plus-sized women who are brown or light-skinned can mitigate colour against gendered fatphobia while fat dark black women feel the brunt of size judgments coupled with colour. Many people struggle with attractiveness issues but anti-blackness is foundational; it is the axis on which many isms pivot. 

But how do we learn what beauty is? It’s not something we’re innately born knowing; you absorb meaning from the people around you, your family, fellas on the block, friends in school, and media of the societies we grow up in, as well as the images imported through TV, music and movies from abroad. Though not all Caribbean black women grew up feeling ugly, there are many of us who have felt colour-based devaluation, and many young women are still experiencing this today.

We hear over and over that fairer skin, softer hair and lessened African features make a person more attractive. We learn how valuable a browning is; we see male Prime Ministers, dancehall, soca stars and athletes (with few exceptions) continuously pair with partners lighter than them. We see fair and brown-skinned women strut across beauty queen and band launch stages, their aesthetic used to market Carnival experiences and sell costumes on websites. We hear and see this in a sea of people who are predominantly black and brown. All men love red women, a Trinidadian male friend told me some years ago. I have spent the greater part of my life being distinctly aware of this. But it’s not just men, women too, can embody the same thinking and rush to befriend, lime with and date women who are perceived as pretty because they look less black.

I learnt a long time ago that I didn’t possess the symmetry of face or hair to inhabit most perceptions of beautiful, but I hadn’t yet acknowledged that limited concepts of beauty ghosted around my mind too, walking in and out of the walls I thought I’d raised to keep them out. The reason I was so flattered many years ago by a past fling was largely because he was attractive by conventional standards and pursued me. A redman and a pretty boy, he was self-absorbed about his looks and fair color, and according to him, he was accustomed to being chased by women due to his appearance. Now, it is continuous work, checking my attractions, interrogating my desires, forgiving myself for what I didn’t have then but possess now.

*

In sixth form college in west Port of Spain, I walked into school one day to discover copies circulating around of lists of the twelve best-looking girls and boys in school, listed by names, numerically. My friends and I pored over the lists noting that nearly every single person on both lists was light-skinned and considered red.^[viii] There was exactly one unmixed, black and dark-skinned girl named, notably, dead last at number twelve, beneath everyone lighter. Though I was aware that I would never be on any such list, I remembered being so incensed at the callousness, the beauty grading, the reiteration of value based on aesthetics and colour, and that people preparing for A-levels had nothing better to do with their time.

I responded saying as much (though I don’t recall exactly what I said) in anonymous printed rebuttals that I typed up in the ministry where my mother worked, under the guise of doing school work before she drove us home, and I went to an office centre in St. Augustine to make as many photocopies as I had funds for; my anger burned from the inside out, propelling me to speak out about things I’d never done before. Then I finagled getting to school early to leave them conspicuously on a few classroom desks, bathroom doors and the outside tables we converged at between classes. I knew other students found them because one of my good friends privately accosted me as the author. 

I did not know terms like beauty privilege or misogynoir back then, and I had never done any classes in women’s studies or feminism, but I knew that it pissed me off to constantly be scraping together a sense of self when reminders were constantly thrown out by society about the low value of dark-skinned women and dark skin overall. There was a thread I felt, tethered between woman and blackness, binding me to others. I was a teenager, and it was already bloody exhausting. It got better when I got older, then it didn’t, then it did again—“it” being the interior work of self-actualization, of buttressing my own sense of self with talk like “me eh business with dem; I know who I am.”

My inheritances: African names  melongene lips
dark skin   kinky hair
forehead wide as the moon

My parents gave me black Barbies and love and “no, you cannot relax your hair” and a naming ceremony and African drumming at camps and The Bluest Eye and Annie John to read but still for many years, I struggled.

*

It is hard to trust a mirror and my interpretation of what it shows. A plethora of mean words, insults from boys in secondary school (at least one was handwritten), loud laughter, and names called out by people will do that. All because people attached meaning to the way that I look physically. I used to be terrified of crowds and any strange group of young people represented a potential for new people to declare me unattractive. I was a perpetually anxious black girl hearing that what’s on the outside isn’t as important as what’s on the inside but seeing no evidence of the sort around me.

One of the greatest perplexities of physical traits and anti-black teasing is the way you can internalize a heavy responsibility for this thing (your skin tone, nose, etc.) even though you didn’t have any choice in your features in the first place. You are here because your face is the result of a line of people who had somehow survived. Perhaps no one would ask for dark skin if they could see the struggles coming; maybe even I would have chosen differently if I had any input in my own looks. Your features, you carry around with you—it’s yours, so people blame you for it. I felt I understood why some families married to maintain colour and hair texture, and it sickened me to feel this revelation uncoiling. I don’t mind if people think I am unattractive to their taste, but do you have to tell me? And are you aware when your attractions are colourist and colonized? Criticizing others’ looks makes them acutely aware of the fact; it puts a stricture on the sense of self. This means it could never be a phantasm inside your own head—it is real. Nothing makes you see yourself like people pronouncing you and your skin as ugly.

As I learnt more about feminist theory and grappled with patriarchy, I’ve always understood that while my worth is greater than my looks, dehumanization is undeserved. Feminism (the academic type from university) gave me a theoretical framework to make other meanings of many things I had already known, breathed, cried through, fought through and lived. Recalibration and resistance to what I had internalized was already unfolding, and while formal feminist thought helped provide language and name concepts, the community of black West Indian, African American and dark South Asian women and their lived experiences discovered online were especially illuminating. Talking with my dark girlfriends, lovers, my Guyanese aunt and uncle about varied experiences and observations are continuously affirming, and holding space for people to honestly process colourism’s pain is so necessary.

Folks not seeing our beauty doesn’t mean that generations of dark-skinned women should be fractured because of that. Caribbean people can be very lookist and beholden to our social links, none of which are unique to us alone, but this can be very damaging if left uprooted. And because self-esteem cannot be engineered in a bubble, this is critical. It is important because young dark black girls deserve validation. In order to heal from who people say you are, you have to be able to conceptualize otherwise, and that can be challenging to do unsupported.

*

There are a few Instagram accounts belonging to women with variations of phenotypes similar to mine that I regularly scroll through.^[ix] How can anyone not see how lovely they are? Their effortless self-portraits and lifestyle curations are stylish and they appear self-assured. Some evenings I look and look and I long to ingest their confidence, to pick globs of it off the screen and breathlessly gorge myself until my critical inner voice is choked silent. 

Jean Marabunta of calypso lore, infamous sex worker, hustler and juggler of sweetmen often sashays across my mind.^[x] Denounced by the Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco) as “ugly,” she, a veritable eyesore, littered town with her sordid behavior. Surely, working-class women like Jean, poor and “suffering badly” have always existed, and it is clear that Sparrow’s repulsion lies with both her looks and sexuality.^[xi] Jean’s promiscuity and poor personal hygiene are underscored by her blackness, implied by Sparrow noting her “picky head,” as well as her name—marabunta, a reference to the feared paper wasp with its deep mocha, venomous body. I wonder about women like Jean, maligned for their looks and blackness—drinking and numbing and surviving traumas.

Each day I scour my reflection in the bathroom, the planes of my face: eyes, nose, chin, acne scars; I struggle to hold myself tenderly and give myself more complimentary love notes. My body is aging, softly and determinedly, breasts and cheeks swollen with plump. My reflection morphs—one day my looks please me, and I am feeling cute that day; another, I am nearly an ogre, hewn together from haphazard woman-parts, feeling shame that the grace I offer to others is hard to give myself. Being called ugly burrowed under my skin for so long that excavation was painful but acknowledging that it hurt no longer embarrasses me. Yes, affirmation is both external and internal; it must be both and demanding space for unmixed blackness to be beautiful is revolutionary. Loving our black selves upends colonized notions of worth and beauty, destabilizes the anti-black axis and generates energetic shifts in the black self and in future black selves. Hacking away at remnants of internalized anti-blackness is vital work, visceral. I assure myself that this is continuous, and there can be a day I will conquer those feelings, slew them, and send them writhing away for good.  

Author Biography

Soyini Ayanna Forde’s poems and nonfiction appear in Radar, ANMLY, Moko, Apogee, and elsewhere. Her writing was named a notable essay in The Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart. A 2023 Tin House Workshop alumna and Periplus Fellow, she holds an MFA from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Rooted in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, she lives, writes, and tree gazes in Florida.

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