I grew up in a fairly diverse and multicultural area, though I always found I was one of the very few Black students in my classes. This was never an overt problem – it just happened to be. However, being surrounded by predominantly white students throughout your most impressionable and insecure years can in fact take its toll – and I recently realised that it had. I figured that throughout my school years, I’d unknowingly attempted to Anglicise my features, in order to match those of my white peers.
Image courtesy of Rodrigo Borges de Jesus via Unsplash
It goes without saying that noticing how you’ve amplified, dulled or simply altered your image to match your surroundings is a confusing, shocking and heart-breaking realisation to have. In my case, this was the years spent straightening (and consequently burning) my natural curls and researching endless remedies to replicate silkier and softer hair textures. I was consistently criticising the curves on my body instead of embracing them (I always thought my obsession with exercise was purely to get healthier and it’s only now that I can see how I had been trying to alter my body type virtually continuously).
And it’s only until even more recently that I realised how this intrinsically links with the Westernised definition of beauty. This has become the globalised norm - think Whitewashing images or the “blondes have more fun” narrative. And within BIPOC communities, the examples are endless. Think of the overt fetishisation of lighter-skinned Black people, or Instagram’s weird obsession with mixed-race babies. Think about bleaching skin to lighten it, or avoiding the sun to prevent tanning. These are all examples of how normalised the constricting definition of Western beauty has become on an international scale. It’s clear that this striving for a lighter skin tone is intrinsically linked with the glorification of white skin.
It’s similar to the global glorification of the English language. Brits abroad often expect English to be spoken in the country they’re visiting, but where is our attempt to learn their language? Or, more than language, their culture? In fact, British people are praised for scrapping together a slow line of Spanish when on holiday in Mallorca, but the slightly broken English of immigrants who speak in multiple dialects is either mocked or looked down upon. The double standard speaks for itself – we live in a world that has come to glorify all aspects of whiteness.
Well, here’s what I’ve come to learn.
I’ve come to learn that to exist outside of the globalised, Western definition of beauty is to consistently question the validity of your attributes. It is to have grown up rarely seeing people that look like you within the mainstream media - and it is to become totally okay with that because that is “the norm.” It ranges from struggling to find the right shade of foundation, to subconsciously associating a posh British accent with intelligence, and a “foreign” one with the opposite.
Though, there’s no doubt that things are changing. Granted, it’s a nearly impossible task to unlearn everything subliminally taught through centuries of colonialism, white supremacy, and hierarchical racial structures. Older generations particularly will struggle to erase or detach the various connotations that they have with certain attributes.
But I’m glad that we’re living through what is essentially a revolutionisation of the beauty industry, as well as the media. Seeing different kinds of beauty being represented authentically within mainstream media is refreshing and certainly a step in the right direction. With younger generations being raised with all that they have access to, educating, sharing, and becoming accustomed to different kinds of beauty is as easy as it has ever been which gives me hope for the future. We must do more to truly understand that outside of the constricting Western ideal, there is a (literal) world of beauty and culture to be appreciated.
By Leyla Mohammed
Display image courtesy of Rodrigo Borges de Jesus via Unsplash
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