Angry Black Woman

Photo by: https://blavity.com

Contrary to prior beliefs, the black woman is not the angry black woman. There is a stigma, a list of them actually, that surrounds black women. We are all angry, or bitchy. Dissatisfied or ignorant. Baby mama's or whores and drama queens, and we seem to so frequently be depicted as such. Even the positive, happier depicted women of color are overlooked due to the frequency of the the negatives.

So often I have conversations with people that somehow seem to lead to what the black woman is, what she stands for, or why she has been neglected.

Let me start by saying, a black woman is one of the most difficult things to be. Especially when you are darker in complexion. As I kid I never felt comfortable in my skin in the way that I am today. Never will I forget wishing that I was of a lighter complexion on so many different occasions. I vividly remember the way that the boys in my 5th grade class drooled over my light skinned cousin and I wanted to be her.

Today I receive a lot more recognition than I did back then but that does not chance the fact that I don't see enough women that look like me in the media, and the way I sometimes feel discouraged by it. If there is a woman that is even close to my color she has longer wavy hair or curls that are much easier to brush than mine. It shows me that theres still this mindset that says that it's better to be of lighter skin complexion, or "foreign".

Does it make me want to be lighter skinned with longer hair? Absolutely not, but it does stir up a significant amount of questions about where we (women) learn these values. Where do men learn these values?

I took the liberty of asking a man and apparently it is something that their values come, not only from the men that raised them but from their peers as well. Men praise other men for having a woman that is considered to be "foreign". He claims that it stems from self hatred. He looked at his relationships with foreign or mixed race women as a sign of prestige.

Keyah: So what is it that makes foreign girls so good?

Gavo: That comes back to that self hatred. I feel like growing up as young black men, speaking for myself, I didn't have pops in the crib so most of us grow up looking at the tv to raise us. So I feel like most of us, when we get that image constantly being put in our head, like this is what beauty is. Even though they jock all of our shit, you see them wearing du rags, and braids now. I saw a white bitch with a grill the other day.

I looked at tv to emulate what a man should be. Constantly being fed this image of, to be the man you have this type of whip and with this type of whip, this is the type of girl you should have. Exotic is always looked at as prestine or something, like its just high class as fuck. I just feel like, fuck that, we're the shit. If it was so cool to be so exotic than they would be the ones being copied the most. We are the most imitated people in the world. That brings me back to excotic being cool, hell we're exotic. Theres nobody like us. We come in so many different shades, we have the dominant gene.

K: So what confuses me is, I know a lot of people that will not date a dark skinned girl. They won't date a girl that looks like me.

G: Thats crazy to me but I get where the idea comes from. If you look at the images on the tv, they don't tell you that black is beautiful all the time. They try to teach us to hate ourselves and we fall for it...we have to start loving ourselves before we can love anybody else.

K: But I'm sure the way you feel about dark skinned women now isn't the way you've always felt is it?

G: Thats definitely correct, this is gonna sound a little wrong when I say it but I'm pretty blunt, growing up the dark skinned chick was always the sexualized one. Like the whole saying, "the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice", thats already teaching to sexualize the black woman and I had that same mentality...

K: So you avoided them?

G: I won't say I avoided them because I don't discriminate, but I didn't take them as serious as I would a fairer skinned woman...