Please take more selfies
When you are someone who is not the norm, who isn’t represented in media or other facets of society, you tend to feel isolated, you tend to want to find a safe space. Safe spaces exist everywhere for minority communities with the help of the Internet and social media. But what happens when a safe space is threatened? What happens when a person who thinks you are below other human beings is elected into the highest position of power? You start to feel your spaces crumble around you, bombarded by enemies who believe the same. That you shouldn’t exist. That you should only exist to be subjugated. That you should only serve as their literal stepping stone to power and success.
Why is it that those in power progress to our detriment?
Colonialism determined the standards of what is and isn’t beautiful. We find this still affecting us years and years later, manifested as colorism. I grew up watching telenovelas starring light-skinned latinxs. My mother took me to the salon every week to get our hair straightened so it looked more polished and put together, unlike our natural unruly curls. My grandmother never fails to point out how beautiful blue eyes are. Features predominant on white people, on the colonizers of our past, are still valued in our communities. The media we consume in latin america perpetuates this with a constant lack of representation of darker skinned latinxs or afrolatinxs. In this day and age, I’ve got Amara la Negra to thank for calling out the rampant colorism in the latinx entertainment industries. Recently in my island, young people are embracing their natural hair, and yet I still have to sit through shampoo commercials starring women donning long, silky straight hair. How do we make a change? Where do we start?
As a language teacher in Japan, I often worked with pictures. I needed the visual imagery to bring my concepts into existence. Often my lessons were tied to my Puerto Rican culture, which, to my luck and surprise, my high schoolers enjoyed learning about. Here’s the thing: I was teaching in a small town in Shiga prefecture. Some of my students rode their bikes for hours to get to school from remote towns. Their exposure to other cultures and ethnicities was limited, which is why I felt it doubly important to teach them as much as I could. Why? Because at all of my schools (I taught at five in total over the course of two years) we had at least a handful of mixed kids as well as South American kids. As expected, the darker skinned ones faced more instances of teasing and rejection for their appearance. The lighter skinned ones were able to get away with praise for being “exotic”. My students in sports clubs always lamented getting tan. Where is their representation?
I understood then the power of an image, the weight it carried, and the pride it gave me as a Puerto Rican to show an integral part of myself to others. My presence was comforting for my Spanish-speaking students, who were always eager to chat me up after class. I learned through them why representation was so important, and how appalling the lack of it in the media they consumed was.
So why not do that with our own faces, our bodies? Why not show them to the world proudly, to remind it we exist? Let’s use the power of images and the technology to spread them to our advantage. Trust me, my small town students are all avid iphone users with instagram accounts.
This isn’t a new concept. Movements surrounding minorities posting selfies- like #Blackoutday- have already made their rounds on social media. My selfies are a weapon. I fight my oppressors by reminding them that I, a queer Caribbean woman, exist. That I am a human being worthy of attention and respect. I want to be seen. We need to be seen.
This is our form of rebellion. We are pushing societal standards of what’s beautiful, desirable. That’s why #Blackoutday is so important.
With every selfie we take, colonizers are reminded of their failure. They couldn’t wipe us out back then, and they won’t now. Not ever.
Please take more selfies, and in the meantime I’ll drink the white tears that follow.
