The Bluest Eye

A couple of months ago my mom and I were oohing and aahing about my god sister's newborn baby girl. She was beautiful: perfect cupid bow lips and quite shockingly bright blue eyes! She was perfect, an angel. As we chatted with my god sister she casually mentioned that she hoped her baby didn’t get any darker. She is “light skinned” and her baby daddy is “dark skinned”. After she made that statement my mom and I darted eyes at each other and then returned to admiring the baby. I know many people feel a certain way about skin color but I have never heard it expressed so bluntly. Since then, my mom and I are secretly delighted as the baby darkens a little each day.

I don’t want to write about the sociology of race, BUT, now that I have moved to the South (although probably technically a mid-western state) the “color issue” has surfaced more frequently that it makes me uncomfortable.

[“Not because I’m dirty, not because I’m clean, just because I kissed a boy behind a magazine.” Random thought. Whatever.]

For example, another god sister was creating my avatar on her Wii. She first picked my body type. She then had to pick my avatar’s skin color. She switched the game’s arrow between the deep brown figure that was so brown you could hardly make out facial features and a coffee-colored avatar. She hesitated and in what I considered an act of pity and to save face, she chose the light coffee colored avatar. I admit: I didn’t want to be the dark one with no features. The avatars on Wii already looked retarded. I didn’t want to be only one that was dark brown and retarded-looking.

There is yet another example. A three-year-old child of a family friend had an epiphany one day and told her white mom that she (her mom) was white. I entertain myself by imagining that she said *in Chris Rock’s voice* “What! Woman youse a white lady! Help, somebody take me back to my family!” At any rate, after that the three-year-old proceeded to name the color of each person around her. The baby was brown. Her sister was white. I was…brown. I was relieved she didn’t say black.

In Northern California, the weak threads of the black bourgeois social circles on which my family feebly tried to maintain a grip were more discreet about color preferences. Many of the mothers in Jack and Jill and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. were “light skinned” or a medium brown color. Quite interestingly, many of those same women were married to darker-colored men. Coincidentally my mother is one of those women but she thinks she is darker than she really and is disappointed when I point out that she is lighter than I am.

I know my struggle with my skin color is deeply packed within the terrain of my self-esteem. I don’t know how to solve it. I think instead of trying to solve it I need to learn to value myself and weaken my tendency toward co-dependency.

That sounded so academic. Eeh.

Check out my girl LatariansAuPair for her perspective on skin color here

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