The Eye Of the Beholder

I get where you are coming from. May I propose another perspective: of the four of us in my family (three girls and one boy), my youngest sister has the chocolate brown skin and what we call the “Indian” hair. In my family it really is Native American as my maternal grandmother’s hair was literally straight even when she washed it and she was definitely brown skinned. My younger sister is also the one of the three of us girls who was naturally thin, definitely fitting my light skinned mother’s idea of the beautiful black woman she wanted to identify as her daughter. So the two of us who are light-skinned and light-eyed and physically heavy set, struggled to meet a maternal standard of beauty that was just exhausting to deal with especially when overlaid with white culture’s standards of beauty. My sense of what my mother aspired to was pretty simply answered by this fact: my father was dark skinned. I think that is what she wanted for herself.