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Own Your Beauty is a groundbreaking, year-long movement bringing women together to change the conversation about what beauty means. Our mission: to encourage and remind grown women that it is never too late to learn to love one's self and influence the lives of those around us - our mothers, friends, children, neighbors. We can shift our minds and hearts and change the path we follow in the pursuit of authentic beauty.
Let me just begin here by saying that this is NOT something I often talk about, especially not in my blogging. This subject comes out when I'm feeling very safe and secure, around trusted friends or family, and usually after at least a slight inebriation.
However, tonight, I figured, why not? Surely others have been through similar things. I'll go for it.
(I'm a little inebriated by caffeine, though. We won't say that counts.)
So here's the story. I won't go into the long version, but let's just say that my mother and father's interracial marriage (she was African-American, he was Caucasian) was the first EVER to happen in our county, and continued to be the only interracial marriage on the books in that county for at least 20 years afterward.
After the wedding, they moved back to California, where they'd met (only having married in the small rural Virginia town of 5,000 because that was where my mother's family was from). Three of us were born -- my older sister, then me, then my younger brother, and we moved back to Virginia.
I was about five years old then, and still pretty oblivious to race issues as a result of my reasonably liberal upbringing in San Diego. This blissful ignorance lasted for a few more years -- that is, until kids at school start breaking off into groups, and none of those groups consisted of both races.
(I say both because, during my childhood, my town had no Hispanic inhabitants of my age, besides one family. No Jewish inhabitants of my age besides one brother and sister, roughly my age. No Asian inhabitants of my age. No Indian inhabitants of my age. And on and on. There were TWO races. And they didn't hang out together outside of the classrooms.)
At the time, there didn't seem to be much animosity between the kids, they just didn't "happen" to spend time together.
At first, I hung out with the African-American kids. My cousins in the area were African-American, so I just went along with them and what they were doing. And although I keep some friends from that group to this day, I didn't fit in there. So around middle school, I started hanging out with the white kids. That just seemed to work better (especially because, as I've been told throughout my life, I don't "act black enough." Funny, I thought I was just acting like myself).
It isn't that there WEREN'T any other biracial kids around, but those kids were always raised by their African-American mothers, had no fathers to speak of, and in no way claimed their white heritage culturally. So I was the only one in the middle. Besides my brother and sister, that is.
So back to the story. I got on with the white kids, well enough. My helper-personality defaulted me into the role of counselor for all my friends (is there any surprise at the career path I've chosen? Turns out I was doing that all along).
There was a problem there, though. No one would date me. During the teeny-bopper years, when who your little note-passing boyfriend is is of major importance, this was a major issue. Even my white friends would sadly shake their heads and say, "Yeah, it's fine that we're friends, but I don't think my parents would let me date a half-black guy either." They saw the injustice of it, but what could they do?
So what could I do? My 12-year old self became obsessed with beauty. Surely if I could be graceful enough, lovely enough, I would be good enough over-all. I would be accepted. I stayed in on weekends and studied Cosmo magazines and Seventeen and whatever else I could get my hands on to figure out the perfect makeup, the perfect hair, the perfect charm and carriage. I practiced my facial expressions in the mirror until I could arch one eybrow perfectly and smile brightly, showing off my white teeth and green eyes (something that was often commented upon - "are those
