Black is beautiful…not

“…that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

A great many years after Martin Luther King Jr. had this dream, his four little children, who are most certainly adults now, and their own little children still live in a world where people are still judged by their skin tone. If truly the dead do see, what King would find very amusing is the surprising turn the ill he spent a good part of his life battling has taken.

As recent as last year, while waiting to be cleared for NYSC, I took on Ushering and Brand Activation jobs to keep body and soul together. As is the case with these jobs, one usually gets audition calls via text messages or broadcasts detailing the specifications and requirements for the job in question. Now, the requirements for these jobs varied – they were dependent on the event theme and majorly, the client’s preferences. One client may decide on size 8 girls while another would prefer sizes 10 and above. Another client might even demand for 5’9″ girls. What all the clients, or at least most of them, had in common however, was their love for “light-skinned or preferably half caste girls”. If I got a dollar for every time I received a text with that phrase, well…hello Oprah.

It was during these times that I became “consciously” aware of this stereotype. Of course, there have been incidents in the past and in my growing up years that allude to a preference for people with fair skin but I never read much into it. When my older cousin, Eze, said he’d marry a “yellow” woman, I thought “Oh well, he likes his women fair. Another cousin will most probably insist on a ‘black’ bride”.

I like jollof rice and my friend Nkiru likes fried rice. That is the way preferences work, right?

Wrong.

Remember when a dark-skinned girl played princess at your primary school’s end of year party? That’s right, me neither.

But I remember being handed pretty yellow dolls as a kid and I remember the story books where God is portrayed as a lighter man than the devil. I also remember the ooh’s and aah’s when a neighbor’s new born is very fair, and the strained smiles and ehyaa‘s when it’s a dark baby. All these little things help build a culture that exalts one skin colour and treats another as not good enough.

To the very few agencies that, maybe out of pity or an attempt to appear different, insist on only dark girls every now and then for ushering and advert jobs, could you please stop it already. I find this as patronizing as the phrase “black beauty”. This is what I hear whenever someone says black beauty – “black is not beautiful, but oh this one is a beauty”. Black is beautiful, very much so, but so is yellow, green, red and as my friend Tola would say, every other colour in between. There is absolutely no need to treat one skin colour as a standard for beauty or treat another as a rarity that should be displayed in a museum. Each and everyone of us is beautifully crafted, wonderfully made


Njideka Akabogu is a graduate of Information Science from Abia State University. She currently writes for The Source Magazine.

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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