How Do We Teach Young Girls Of Color Self-Esteem?

Unless you’re in possession of an uncanny confidence that isn’t directly proportional to how closely your aesthetic matches a European standard of beauty (in which case, congratulations and please don’t hoard the secret), you are, instead, probably in possession of the same self-loathing that haunts all of us to some degree.

You are not good enough. Thin enough. White enough. Your eyelashes are too short, your ankles too fat, your smile too dingy, your hair too curly, your body is just, too much.

It’s different for everyone — because our bodies are so very different — but the takeaway is the same: Everything needs to be fixed.

This cycle of self-admonishment is never more dangerous or ubiquitous than with young girls of color; they are without the critical analyzing skills needed to condemn the messages that are bombarding them day in and day out, and they are, by definition, never going to achieve what is called “beautiful.” The system of Western beauty was created without their faces and bodies as part of the equation.

In the 2013 essay, “The Beauty Ideal: The Effects of European Standards of Beauty on Black Women,” Susan Bryant describes this phenomenon not as a troubling phenomenon but as a societal scourge:

“The detrimental effect of these European…