“Revelations About Being Brown In A World Of White Beauty”
“during my sophomore year of high school, their warnings would come into sharper focus as my British literature class zeroed in on the following passage:
“Gap-toothed was she, it is the truth I say.
Upon a pacing horse easily she sat,
Wearing a large wimple, and over all a hat
As broad as is a buckler or a targe;
An overskirt was tucked around her buttocks large”
This was also the year that Sir Mix-a-Lot’s seminal classic “Baby Got Back” ascended in hip-hop and pop charts, and blared across booming systems on ashy gray Midwest streets, the year when my male classmates perfected their marriage of dick jokes and hip-hop, and embraced their discovery of black female backsides. These were the tender years of youth and the bane of my fucking existence. However, teenagers being teenagers, and I, the singularly gap-toothed person in class, all eyes shifted on me. As expected, a request emerged, set up for ridicule: “Hey, S — smile?”
I don’t think I smiled much in class for the rest of that unit. And if I did, I harbored great discomfort. I don’t think I stopped participating in class discussions; I was still my father’s daughter, defiant and gap-toothed, very much assertive in self-expression. I was still a nerd, but I cannot deny that I leaned on the strength of my intellect because I feared everyone had finally accepted this truth so wretchedly rendered in Chaucer’s portrait of “The Wife of Bath”: to have gap teeth is to be ugly and to boot, sexually promiscuous. Even the textbook insisted that the trait was an imperfection, implying Chaucer’s portrayal as proxy for a widely accepted Westernized beauty standard.
Who the hell set things up like this?…
If I wasn’t beautiful, at least I was smart as hell. I learned the craft of being exceptional.”
Related: “All the Pretty Mermaids: Racist Narratives in Entertainment for Children”; “Oscar Nominee Lupita Nyong’o Speech on Black Beauty Essence Magazine Black Women In Hollywood Award”
