CULTURE|RACE
Do I Look Scary To You?
Please do not tell me that skin color doesn’t matter when it clearly does
What if someone nicknamed you “Scary” because they couldn’t remember your name? How would that make you feel, especially as a woman, let alone a woman of color?
I’ve never been a fan of The Spice Girls but I have wondered for decades now why Scary Spice was called Scary.
It’s always rubbed me the wrong way because she’s mixed-race, like me, and she’s the only one in the band of five women who has a name with more of a negative connotation.
In case you’re not familiar, there’s Posh, Baby, Sporty, and Ginger (I had to look them up to remember them all correctly).
Between Halloween around the corner and people I follow on social media geeking about talks of a Spice Girl Reunion on the horizon, I finally satiated my curiosity and looked up how the girls got their names.
Scary Spice said: “It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames.
Nowadays, calling Mel B “scary” leaves a bitter taste in some people’s mouths given that she’s the only mixed-race member of the group and her nickname plays up to the ‘scary black woman’…
