AT­TIL­LAH SPRINGER

I love you

I love you

I love you any­how

And I don't care if you don't want me

I'm yours right now

I put a spell on you

Be­cause you're mine

-I put a Spell on You, Ni­na Si­mone

There's an in­ter­est­ing doc­u­men­tary se­ries on tele­vi­sion in Eng­land called Beau­ty and the Beast: Ug­ly face of Prej­u­dice. It charts the lives of peo­ple liv­ing with se­ri­ous face dis­fig­ure­ments, who are then put to live for a week with some­one with a "nor­mal" face who is to­tal­ly ob­sessed with be­ing beau­ti­ful.

It's the kind of painful watch­ing that makes you feel slight­ly dirty and voyeuris­tic. But by the end of every episode you don't know if to feel sor­ry for the peo­ple with their dis­fig­ured faces, re­mod­elled af­ter hor­rif­ic ac­ci­dents or cut apart to get rid of can­cers, or for the peo­ple who put them­selves at week­ly and month­ly ex­pense to make them­selves some ver­sion of per­fect.

It brings in­to sharp re­lief the state of emo­tion­al well-be­ing that pre­vails in coun­tries and con­ti­nents and na­tions across the world whose sense of them­selves is dic­tat­ed by an air­brushed un­re­al­i­ty. The per­fect colour, the per­fect waist size, the per­fect tex­ture of hair. That all of these stan­dards of beau­ty are still de­ter­mined by white­ness is a rea­son for shock, con­sid­er­ing that Eu­ro­peans are a glob­al mi­nor­i­ty.

But the glob­al mi­nor­i­ty with the re­source ma­jor­i­ty de­ter­mine how we all see our­selves. De­ter­mine whether we con­sid­er our­selves beau­ti­ful enough to mat­ter in a so­ci­ety so su­per­fi­cial and dri­ven by the ap­pear­ance of suc­cess, luck and wealth. We have al­ways adorned our­selves. And noth­ing is wrong with adorn­ment. Noth­ing is wrong with putting rouk­ou on your face to go to war. Or lip­stick on your mouth to at­tract the gaze to your full mouth.

So here comes this woman who looks like Ne­fer­ti­ti her­self who has come back to Earth in the body of a young woman from Trinidad. Here comes this woman who has all the hall­marks of Tri­ni wom­an­ness. All the at­ti­tude and the ef­fort­less sex­i­ness and the sense of a spir­it that is burst­ing out of the cage called flesh.

And you have to won­der if black­ness is some kind of se­ri­ous dis­fig­ure­ment that Trinida­di­ans can­not coun­te­nance. So they can tell you things like you dark but you nice. As if dark skin is some sort of pro­duc­tion er­ror, some stain that some of us get that makes us not so per­fect. I mean, you would think we would be bored of this con­ver­sa­tion by now. About who is too black and low class to be a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the coun­try.

You would think that af­ter Wendy and Ken­isha we wouldn't be hav­ing this same old stu­pid con­ver­sa­tion. You would think so in a coun­try where the women are so beau­ti­ful you could weep and the ones who aren't are beau­ti­ful any­way. I feel Athali­ah's pain.

Of not be­ing agency brown. She has the "mod­el" frame but she doesn't look like cook­ie-cut­ter de­fault Tri­ni woman. When on any giv­en day in Port-of-Spain you can see beau­ty of so many shades and de­scrip­tions that re­al­ly to have a de­fault set­ting is to de­ny your­self the full­ness of beau­ty. It would be like eat­ing half a starch and throw­ing away the rest.

The fact is that she won the place. There was some­thing about her that cap­tured some­body's feel­ing that she would be good to rep­re­sent T&T. I have min­i­mal if any in­ter­est in beau­ty pageants in gen­er­al. I didn't keen­ly fol­low the con­tes­tants be­cause, quite frankly, I couldn't give two shakes of a rat's pos­te­ri­or who rep­re­sents us in a beau­ty pageant when the peo­ple who rep­re­sent us in Par­lia­ment seem to be just as con­cerned about ap­pear­ance as the peo­ple in the beau­ty pageants.

But the fact that there was such con­cern about a woman in a beau­ty pageant says a lot about how ma­ture we are. Dark skin whether on In­di­ans or Africans is bad in some peo­ple's equa­tions. Black­ness is a curse. Black­ness is a rea­son for you to stay in the back. That is why black women, long con­sid­ered the least at­trac­tive on the beau­ty scale, con­tin­ue to have to face pub­lic ridicule and the most mind-bog­gling in­sults.

Black women need to stay back and not dare think that they are beau­ti­ful enough or bleach them­selves in­to an ac­cept­able brown or straight­en their hair in­to a flowy enough state of re­lax­ation. The ug­ly face of our prej­u­dice is far ugli­er than the black­ness we are so ter­ri­fied of.

That we still play our prej­u­dices in pub­lic, that we now bray our words of self-dep­re­ca­tion in­to the will­ing au­di­ence that cheers and cack­les its em­bar­rass­ment and shame and per­haps re­lief that they have some Scot­tish an­ces­tor thrice re­moved who, thank God, put a lit­tle milk in the cof­fee so that they didn't come out too black. It's much deep­er than a beau­ty pageant or some pic­tures on a Web site. This is our his­to­ry stalk­ing us. Beg­ging us please to con­front it or be doomed to for­ev­er re­peat it.