Living in a post-Civil Rights Movement era, many would like to think that we live in a world blind to race. While I dearly wish that this were true, race does, and will continue to, impact our lives and our perceptions of each other. Our standards of beauty have changed little to reflect the diversity present in today’s society, and examples of this unfortunate reality are everywhere. Despite the great leaps we have made in racial equality, we, as a society, continue to support an outdated definition of beauty.
In my English class, we are reading Shakespeare’s “Othello.” The play’s explanatory notes define fair as: “Light in complexion, and therefore, by the standards of Shakespeare’s day, beautiful.” Later, the notes inform the reader that black means “dark in complexion and therefore, by the standards of Shakespeare’s day, unattractive.” We have undoubtedly progressed since “Shakespeare’s day,” but why do our newer standards of beauty still remain so archaic?
Shakespeare’s antiquated beauty standards appear everywhere. During the 2013 High School Students of Color Conference in Cambridge, MA, I participated in a workshop where we were instructed to create collages on any social justice issue that came to mind—homophobia, classism, poverty, etc. As my partner and I flipped through the pages of the magazines we were given, I suddenly realized almost every ad showcased Caucasian women. Even the black women I managed to glimpse were of a fairer complexion. I couldn’t help but wonder why such a disproportionate percentage of ads featured blonde white women as compared to the various other ethnicities that make up a significant portion of our nation’s population and call the United States home.
This issue extends further than just magazine advertisements—it is also apparent in the larger media. As a child, I began to notice that I rarely saw little girls who looked like me on TV or in books. Around middle school, I realized that I could hardly name any famous black women with darker complexions. The first black celebrities I think of are usually Rihanna, Halle Berry or Beyonce—all light-skinned women.
The truth is, our society operates with a Eurocentric standard of beauty. Don’t believe me? Then why do millions of black women chemically straighten their hair or spend hundreds of dollars on straight weaves? Why can’t one watch Indian television without seeing at least one ad for skin-lightening creams every hour? It’s because our society still, in fact, supports the standard of beauty written into Shakespeare’s “Othello”—a standard which fails to recognize the diversity of beauty within America.
I am by no means implying that features such as light skin or blonde hair are unattractive—far from it, actually. We simply need to understand that, as a society, there is more than one form of beauty. We must spread awareness of this issue through discourse. Rather than ignore the presence of these problems, we need to speak up about them. If we continue to hold conversation on these problems, one day they will no longer be problems at all—only notes in the margins of a Shakespearean play.
Skylar-Bree Takyi is a Junior from East Orange, NJ.
