YOUTH NOW
“I Hate That I’m Black. I Hate That I’m Ugly. I Hate My Nose.”
A young girl struggles to square her beauty with what she sees on screen
One day in third grade, I pulled a green slip of paper from my desk. In a dark, haunting ink, I wrote down all the things I hated about myself. I hate that I’m Black. I hate that I’m ugly. I hate my nose.
When I handed my mother the green slip, she read the words back to me like she was returning borrowed things. She had kept her ugly close to her once, a toothbrush she returned to twice a day, a common ritual for the women with our faces. My mother knew she could smooth the ugly out of me as she did with her own ugly. She showed me pictures of Angela Davis, bought records with Diana on the sleeve, staring a hole through the ugly in me.
My mother threw me these women, bones that called me to attention. But when I pressed my face against their faces, put my jaw to Angela’s jaw, I couldn’t make out the similarities, couldn’t find the same shine in my temples. I knew these women were supposed to remind me of myself, but there was an obvious disconnect between the Black girls presented to me as beautiful, and the Black girl written on the green slip.
The danger of representation is that it’s…
