Brown Skin Girl
Do you remember the first time you saw yourself? The moment you could flit your gaze from a mirror see yourself reflected in a film? Or maybe it was a television show, print ad, or textbook?
I ask these questions of myself as salty tears leave tributaries to a deep seated pain within my chest. The steady flow of tears are familiar, they’ve kept me company since my first Halloween as Princess Jasmine and guide my hand with each pass of the straightening iron. I have been crying since I can remember, longing for a vision of myself that moves beyond the confines of a mirror pane.
Today I saw myself, perhaps for the first time, and caught my breath as my heart beat slowed to match the harmonies of Brown Skin Girl. My eyelashes, too heavy with those familiar tears, obscured visions of Black and Brown beauty and happiness, and I retired those painful memories of feeling lost and confused. For the first time as an adult, I did not feel the push and pull of racial binaries and the sharp blade of colonial constructs of identity. As I cried, my tears overflowed from the boundaries of “Other” identity boxes and my shoulders sagged, unburdened by the mask I’ve worn for thirty (!!!!) years.
Sheerah Ravindren in a still from Brown Skin Girl in Beyoncé's Black is King
Watching Brown Skin Girls in Black is King is my most powerful memory of seeing myself - a mixed race Afro Dominican Guyanese woman. I replay the memory often since it’s release a few short days ago, and find myself lost in the pain connected to my multiracial identity.
I grew up Brown. In my concrete playground of Brooklyn, NY I skinned my knees recreating Bollywood films, watched my beautiful aunts and mother tweeze the arches of their eyebrows, and felt wafts of turmeric and curry powder envelop me as tightly as the memory of my grandfather. I was Guyanese through in through, with knobby legs and garbled patois rolling off my tongue as I grew up as my mother’s American dream. The only Dominican thing about me, as she’d say, are my hands and feet - clear miniature copies of my fathers weathered hands and roughened feet. I carried the world in my palms and I did so with his strength.
Growing up, all I knew and understood was that I was “brown”. A beautiful precocious blending of my Dominican father and Guyanese mother, the richness of American possibility filled my lungs with each breath. I was, after all, born on the Fourth of July, and I was meant to do great things - like all first born children of immigrants.
Being brown, for me, always (and still does, but for different reasons now) felt like a point of pride. My cinnamon skin glistened with cocoa butter and my long wavy hair would betray the straightening comb, curling at my temples like my fathers coarse curls. Being brown helped connect me to other little brown girls with gelled down plaits and butterfly clips bouncing in their hair. With Guyana gold dripping from my ears and freshly pressed Guess jeans, I was just another face in a sea of Brown at school. I’d sing off key in our playground and fight for turns with friends in games of handball. We were all “brown”, excited hopeful, and young. Our lineages were Nigerian, Eritrean, Saudi, Jamaican, Guyanese, Ghanian, Trinidadian, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, Cuban, and grounded by the diaspora roots that made all of my friends - and me - brown. Back then, my brownness was a backdrop for all my experiences, always present but never in the forefront of my mind. Until the questions came.
Where are you from? What are you? What are you mixed with? I’d recite these questions in my young sing song voice and watch my mother’s patience transform her focused face into a mask of fury. I’d lose that lilting cadence for rote repetitions of “Manhattan” and “American” as answers to these inquiries on my identity. As I got older, conversations about race and ethnicity were veiled in anti-Blackness and xenophobia. A Fourth of July baby is purely American, and any longing for stories of my parents' growing up in Guyana or Dominican Republic had no room in my interior life. Memories associating happiness and pride with my brownness were soon replaced with feelings of shame and loneliness. Phrases like “not Black”, “we have good hair”, and the empty silence of dismissal were associated with questions about my brownness.
As I grew into young adulthood, conversations about race were less about dialogue and more about the subtle way my mother clutched her purse around other Black people, the sharp enunciation in front of White people, the call for respectability that was as as normative as spreading butter on a tennis roll, and the absence of Spanish in our home. "Brown" became the simple definitive answer for any questions about my identity once we moved to White middle class suburbia. The "what are you"s were joined with "Do you speak Indian?" and the introduction of slurs from classmates in my French 101 class. I still remember the hotness of my cheeks when I asked my dad what a "spic" was because someone called me that at lunch. We didn't talk about race explicitly at home, but it was everywhere. I learned that my deep skin wasn't attractive by the time I was 12, to be ashamed of my hairy arms and legs, and no longer correct anyone when they read my name with new syllables and consonants. By time time I was fifteen, the loneliness of invisibility felt more comfortable that the heat of embarrassment of correcting my teachers and classmates. It was easier being Kristin than Kristian.
Growing up mixed-race, for me, has been an ongoing practice of making do with the in-between . I've lived within the hyphen all my life and "brown" has been the simplest and most palatable word that's described me. The in-between of colonial constructions of race has always jettisoned me to the "Other" box, and monoracist commentary on what constitutes "real" or "full" (insert racial identity here) would quell any desire to ask questions, talk about my confusions, and fueled this expanding loneliness around my identity. To many people, being mixed-race is understood like fractions - I'm a living breathing mathematical equation compromised of racial percentages and segmented identities.
Fast forward to July 31st, 2020, where I'm nestled on my couch watching Black is King ™️ for the first time. Simultaneously in awe of the visual imagery of the project itself and the familiar beats of this beloved soundtrack, I also felt overwhelmed with the first still of Sheerah Ravindren (pictured above) as melodies of Blue Ivy Carter's voice harmonized with image after image of beautiful women with skin like pearls. I was overwhelmed with the realization of how much I needed this. Needed to finally see some semblance of myself free of narrow phenotypical definitions ... to feel the openness of wholeness without the pernicious gatekeeping of racial identity that's framed my life thus far. So, perhaps, when someone projects their nosey colonial curiosity my way and asks 'what are you?", I'll respond with a Brown Skinned Girl.
