If you don’t know me or haven’t seen my pictures in previous posts, I am biracial: Caucasian and African-American. I don’t exactly know how to describe my usual skin tone…my foundation calls it “caramel” so let’s go with that.
In the winter, I am my lightest shade because my tan fades. In the summer, I tan extremely fast. I am easily 5 or 6 shades darker by the end of the summer than I am at, say, the end of March. These past few summers, especially, I have tanned a lot. I was a lifeguard at an outdoor water park two summers ago; I tanned a lot. Last summer I was in California for a month at the Naval Base in San Diego and we were outside in the sun constantly; I tanned a lot. This summer, I will be in Oman for two months and we have weekend excursions where we are outside a lot. It’s also 100+ degrees pretty much every day; I have already tanned and I will tan a lot more.
For many people, tanning is awesome. People wish they could tan like me. But the people that say this are either white or are very light-skinned. I try to avoid tanning as much as I can. Why? For stupid cultural reasons. Let me try to explain:
I have grown up in a very diverse community with people of all different skin tones. There are so many beautiful shades of brown but in school there was always this sort of struggle between light-skinned kids and darker-skinned kids. It was better to be “light-skinned.” It’s more attractive, it’s prettier, it’s this, it’s that. So if you were really dark, you’d get teased. Or maybe you’d hear things like “You’re really pretty for a dark-skinned girl,” which really isn’t a compliment. I was always considered “light-skinned” which was fine. I never really gave it much thought when I was younger because I guess I had the privilege of doing so.
Now, in the past couple of summers, I will come home and my family and friends will tease me for how dark I have gotten. We laugh, they tease me all summer, I tease my friends over their tans too, no big deal right? Wrong. It’s problematic.
In so many cultures around the world, women bleach their skin. They go through treatments or use harmful creams and chemicals to lighten their skin tones, to become lighter, to become “whiter.” That’s a problem. Here in Oman my friend’s language partner, a local Omani woman, took her to get a mani-pedi and she paid for a skin lightening treatment. This is a “thing” all over the world. Women, especially, can’t embrace the beauty of their natural skin tone because the media and society in general are constantly reinforcing the idea that white, or light skin is beautiful and that there are few exceptions to this beauty standard.
Many white people want to tan and get a little darker but would they actually want to be dark-skinned? It’s fun to tan and fun to be that beachy, sun-kissed brown but they are still obviously white and their tans will disappear after the summer. Brown people, of any ethnicity, can’t just stop being brown. We don’t have that choice. We can lighten our skin, we can bleach it and use chemicals on it but we are still brown. Society will always consider us brown and we will experience whatever stigma that comes with that truth all of our lives.
I’ve thought about this before but today I got a comment on a social media picture that didn’t sit well with me. If you read my previous post from today, you will have seen that I had the chance to go dune bashing and camel riding in the desert. I posted a selfie of me and the camel and someone commented that I was going to get super dark and that I was already dark after being here for two weeks. Who posted the comment and their relationship to me is unimportant. I am not necessarily upset with them specifically; I am upset with this way of thinking and the fact that it is so ingrained in my community to be obsessed with skin tone. I just did some of the coolest things I have ever done and the only thing that person could say was that I was going to get dark? Really? Do you not see that I am posing with a camel in the desert in Oman? Who cares if I’m tanning.
But this is normal. Normally, I probably wouldn’t have gotten upset about a comment like that. I probably would have teased this same person if they were getting dark. That’s just the nature of our relationship. But this time…it didn’t sit well. I was so excited about what I had gotten the chance to do and I was disappointed that my skin tone was the focus. And I’m sure the person who made the comment wasn’t the only one thinking it. I have tanned a lot already, I don’t want to get darker. I like my “caramel” skin. But should it really matter? Isn’t my brown beautiful? Aren’t all shades of brown beautiful?
Source: The Other Rocky Mountains
Full Article: Isn’t My Brown Beautiful?