BimpeeDimps: Dark Skin Is Beautiful

Dark Skin Is Beautiful

So this blog post is going to be a little different from the ones I usually do. This one is about something that is very important to me and still leaves me shocked that to this day many people don't believe that their skin is beautiful. Today I am going to be talking about dark skin and the fight for it to be something beautiful again.

The media is everywhere in the time and century that we are in. So it confuses me as to why there is such a minority of dark skinned people represented in a positive light. We have beautiful dark skinned celebrities who for some reason are repeatedly chosen to play the misfortunate character like Lupita Nyong'o who played Patsey, a slave in 12 Years A Slave. Or Viola Davis who in The Help played a black maid. Even when we play the good guys things always end up going sour like Jamie Foxx's role in The Amazing Spider Man 2 as Max Dillon a Spider Man super fan who ends up becoming an evil villain. We don't want people to think that one skin colour is better than the other however we get the impression that this is what the media wants us to think. Many children's TV shows have characters of colour on them, however there are very little dark skinned characters who our diverse children and teenagers are able to look up to.

Cymphonique Miller from Nickelodeon's How To Rock

China Anne McClain from Disney's A.N.T. Farm Dionne Bromfield from CBBC's Friday Download

Even our cartoon characters are losing out like in the 2009 Disney Princess movie The Princess and The Frog we were so pleased to find out that we had a black princess only to see she was a green frog for half of the movie. The next Disney Princess movie Frozen then gave us Elsa who had pale white skin, blue eyes and white hair leading to people wondering why Disney was whitewashing their characters and led to the social media movement This Could Have Been Frozen where users began to redesign Elsa and some users began redrawing other Disney Princesses. Out of the 12 Disney Princesses eight of them are white. What will our kids grow up thinking if they don't see people that look like them on TV? We need to be examples to our children otherwise they'll grow up believing that not everyone is beautiful which we all are. Look at the video below. You don't have to watch all of it but just know these children at such a young age already believe that dark skin is bad.

Disney's Tiana from The Princess and The Frog Disney's Elsa From Frozen

Disney's Ariel Re-imagined Disney's Meg Re-Imagined

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkpUyB2xgTM

The Doll Test

We have such little representation of coloured, let alone dark skinned people being beautiful and we know this from multiple commercials and magazines. People Magazine as of 2014 have only had 14 out 265 people as the main image on the cover of their magazines been African American. Previous People Magazine Editor Tatsha Robertson sued her editor Betsy Gleick due to racial discrimination. Mrs Gleick stated to Ms. Robertson that she didn't think Queen Latifah should be on the cover because Lupita Nyong'o and Robin Roberts both African Americans were on the covers two weeks before.

People Magazine Covers Featuring a Black Person

In our society there is a large handful of people who look in magazines and at adverts and the dominant ideology is that people in them are very beautiful which leads young people to want to imitate their look. Unfortunately there is not enough variation in the people that we see in magazines. Just typing in 'Maybelline Commercial' into Google Images gives us a sea of caucasian faces. Even when there are people of colour there is very little dark skinned individuals represented and this leads many wondering 'Am I beautiful?'

A Google Search of Maybelline Commercial

L'Oreal Lipgloss Advert

Covergirl Game Face Advert L'Oreal Eyeshadow Advert

Skin colour is a very controversial factor in many countries like India where they made sales of $13 million in 2008-09 for Fair and Lovely. Even Vaseline is in on the skin lightening market where they have developed a Facebook App where users are able to make their skin colour whiter. Celebrities like Beyonce are also in the limelight due to them looking whitewashed over the years. In relation there are too many people wishing that there skin was lighter. The reason for this being that lighter skin is thought to be more beautiful. This could relate back to the times of slavery where lighter skin meant that you were in the house or related closer to the white and superior master while having darker skin meant that you were outside and worked in the sun because you were not 'good enough.'

A Fair and Lovely Advert

Many companies have gone as far as ridiculing dark skin like in the Dunkin' Donuts advert below they have used the 'blackface' mechanism painting someone's face black. CEO Nadim Salhani believed the controversy was absolutely ridiculous. 'I don't get it. What's the big fuss? What if the product was white and I painted someone white, would that be racist?' Seeing as caucasian people have privilege in life just because of their skin colour which is hard to hear but is very true I would say that it is.

Other adverts discriminating dark skin include the Indian commercial for Fair and Lovely where a girl is unable to get a job because of her skin but after using the product she is lighter, filled with confidence and get's the job. African Magazine 'Drum' had a issue with a girl who had bleached her skin and the cover line 'I was tired of being ugly' on the cover. Is this appropriate? This could affect millions of girls self esteems. Instead why not promote the beauty of darker skin.

Fair and Lovely Commerical

Drum Magazine Issue

I didn't really realise that people could be so interested and amused by a person's skin colour personally until I reached high school. The first day I ever got made fun of because of my skin was the day I looked in the mirror and thought to myself, maybe I'm not beautiful. There were so many nicknames I was called which I left branded on my skin for a long time. To me I was 'Blick', 'Midnight', 'Charcoal', 'Shadow' and all of the other names that I had thrown at me. The phrases were equally bad with people saying 'Where's Adebimpe?' when the lights were turned off. Or saying things like 'People can't see you on a summer's day' and 'You're camouflaged' whenever I was stood against something black. This is not okay. Just because someone laughs at jokes in front of you does not mean that they don't go home crying and wishing they were lighter and more beautiful. Why should someone feel ugly because of their skin colour. If you go as low as to make others feel substandard because of their skin then you need to look in the mirror and realise that beauty isn't just skin deep. So let's change this. Let's appreciate all skin colours and make everyone feel beautiful. For all of my dark skinned sisters out there, just know that dark skin is not ugly. In fact, it's BEAUTIFUL!

Representations of Beauty for my Dark and Lovely people!