1741 Permalink -via racebending

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For girls of color, internalizing the message that we are inherently inferior and ugly and freakish can happen explicitly and it can happen insidiously and it can happen just by repeated exclusion. It can happen when you are browsing online beauty tutorials only to realize none of these videos and their various tips and tricks work on your monolids or your eye shape or your skin color, and yes, you’ve seen and understand the disclaimer that there is no one-size-fits all when it comes to beauty, but still, why does the most commonly referred to “size” always seem to not fit the beauty of girls of color?

It can happen when you think you’d like to hop on the cotton candy pastel dyed hair trend only to realize that this is not a trend that is easy to accomplish on dark Asian hair and that in order to have pastel pink hair you would literally have to bleach your hair three times and even then it would likely turn dark magenta in a week, and feeling forlorn you scroll through pictures of cute girls with My Little Pony hair online and realize almost all these girls are white.

In middle school, it happened under the guise of science, when the smartest girl at my school came up to me and told me that she had scientific PROOF that Eastern European girls are more beautiful than everyone else. She was, of course, Eastern European. Some researchers had conducted a study where the study participants were shown photos of different faces from all around the world with all kinds of skin tones and features, and surprise, surprise, the faces that rated the highest were the ones that conformed to white standards of beauty.

I wanted to say that I didn’t need a scientific study to tell me that we live in a world that has historically upheld and continues to uphold the racist belief that white people are better, smarter, more beautiful, more human, more worthy, more complex, more heroic, more inherently good than any other type of person!

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