Five Beauty Tips For The Lightskinned And White Adjacent
Sorry, you don’t have a corner on natural beauty, you’re just closer to what’s conventional. (Read: whiteness, cisness, ablebodyness, etc.)
When I was 12, my mother moved away and told me and my brother that we were “too white to come.” She wanted a new start with her new husband and my half siblings, and we just didn’t fit in. “People ask too many questions,” she explained. “It’s just too confusing.” So instead of splitting our weeks between her home and our father’s — like we’d been doing for years — we stayed with him in New Jersey and she relocated her new black family to Massachusetts.
I ached for them, but I wasn’t mad. As a child of a black mother and a white father, I was already hyper aware of race and its sticky, complicated residue on my daily life. I understood that defending a multi-racial family was an annoying and relentless project, because people interrogated me daily. I desperately wanted to be free from the constant examinations — so I didn’t begrudge my mother or anyone else for wanting the same freedom.
I also knew that my stepfather, a former pro football player and stereotypically “scary-looking black guy,” might find it awkward at best and potentially dangerous at worst to go to the…
