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| The beautiful Lupita Nyong'o |
I read this and just felt I had to blog about this issue. I
have seen and met so many Africans with low self-esteem and displaying typical
slave trade mentality. I will talk more on this issue some other time. Lupita’s speech was made at the Essence’s
Black Women in Hollywood event. The 30-year old started her speech by reading a
letter written to her by a young girl who viewed her as a role model.
The 30-year old started her speech by reading a letter
written to her by a young girl who viewed her as a role model. Her speech goes
as follows:
Thank you Alfre, for such an amazing, amazing introduction
and celebration of my work. And thank you very much for inviting me to be a
part of such an extraordinary community.
I am surrounded by people who have inspired me, women in
particular whose presence on screen made me feel a little more seen and heard and
understood. That it is ESSENCE that holds this event celebrating our
professional gains of the year is significant, a beauty magazine that
recognizes the beauty that we not just possess but also produce.
I want to take this opportunity to talk about beauty, Black
beauty, dark beauty. I received a letter from a girl and I’d like to share just
a small part of it with you: “Dear Lupita,” it reads, “I think you’re really
lucky to be this Black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was
just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you
appeared on the world map and saved me.”
My heart bled a little when I read those words, I could
never have guessed that my first job out of school would be so powerful in and
of itself and that it would propel me to be such an image of hope in the same
way that the women of The Color Purple were to me.
I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the
TV and only saw pale skin, I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin.
And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up
lighter-skinned. The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing
my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of
a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first. And every day I
experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I was the day
before. I tried to negotiate with God, I told him I would stop stealing sugar
cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted, I would listen to my mother’s every
word and never lose my school sweater again if he just made me a little
lighter. But I guess God was unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He
never listened.
And when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse, as you can
imagine happens with adolescence. My mother reminded me often that she thought
that I was beautiful but that was no conservation, she’s my mother, of course
she’s supposed to think I am beautiful. And then…Alek Wek. A celebrated model,
she was dark as night, she was on all of the runways and in every magazine and
everyone was talking about how beautiful she was. Even Oprah called her
beautiful and that made it a fact. I couldn’t believe that people were
embracing a woman who looked so much like me, as beautiful. My complexion had
always been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden Oprah was telling me it
wasn’t. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to
enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside
of me, when I saw Alek I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could
not deny.
Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen,
more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of beauty. But around me the
preference for my skin prevailed, to the courters that I thought mattered I was
still unbeautiful. And my mother again would say to me you can’t eat beauty, it
doesn’t feed you and these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really
understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I
could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.
And what my mother meant when she said you can’t eat beauty
was that you can’t rely on how you look to sustain you. What is fundamentally
beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you. That kind of
beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul. It is what got Patsey in so
much trouble with her master, but it is also what has kept her story alive to
this day. We remember the beauty of her spirit even after the beauty of her
body has faded away.
And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the
magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey. That you will feel
the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of
being beautiful inside.
There is no shame in Black beauty.
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