Little Black Girl Grown Up

By Stephanie M. Watts

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Before I could put words to the feeling, I knew.  I was different.  The kind of different that left me feeling unnoticed, unattractive and unimportant - invisible.  Once I became too old to be “cute,” I became smart as in, “She’s so smart,” but never again “cute” or “pretty.”  I may have been called these things during my adolescent years, but I don’t remember hearing them. Something I’m sure many other little black girls have experienced.  Sometimes I think we’re the only set of girls in the world that adults never think to call “beautiful.”  As a result, our form of beauty is never affirmed, planting those first seeds of self-doubt in our very young and impressionable minds.   

When I entered junior high school, I remember seeing boys who looked like me never glancing my way, while simultaneously stopping in their tracks to gaze at a girl with pale skin and light eyes.  I would constantly see little brown boys pass an obviously pretty brown girl and never look twice.  Meanwhile, the little pale boys didn’t look at the pretty brown girls either.  If they did, I never noticed.  Even at this young age, I knew something was wrong with this picture.  Why didn’t the little boys who looked like me ever seem to notice me or the other little brown girls?  To add to my pre-teen confusion was the attention and admiration I and other little brown girls received from our Latino peers. They seemed to like us little brown girls just fine and weren’t afraid to show it.  And the confusion known as “youth” and “little black girl” continued.  

High school came next.  I entered it with all the insecurities and anxieties of a normal teenager, but with some culture shock mixed in for good measure.  My family took this opportune time to relocate us to “the South.”  It was here that I became invisible no more, but for all the wrong reasons.  Among my peers in the black community, I was instantly labeled “light-skinned” or “redbone” – drawing either admiration or hate from the assigned label - something I did not want or ask for.  Up until this point, I had never heard such terms or knew what they meant. Yes, before I arrived in this place called Dixie, I was just good ‘ol “black” and that was just fine with me. In contrast, the whites of the community - still angry that they lost the war – just saw another “colored” girl.  They didn’t make the same color distinctions as my black peers did.  If you were a shade past olive then you were black and that’s all that mattered to them.  They just needed to know who to hate.  And so went my teenage years, a blur of time when a young black girl unexpectedly and desperately wanted to be invisible again.

Finally, college came.  It would be my escape.  I got my first taste of black womanhood there.  Suddenly, this little black girl wasn’t invisible anymore and didn’t want to be.  My first two years of college were spent at an HBCU.  It was here that I found my “soft place“- that place of security and safety where I was free to just be me. It was on this black college campus where I learned just how wonderful it felt to have my very essence and MY unique beauty celebrated.  Each day I would be greeted with various terms of endearment, such as “Queen” or “Black Beauty.”  Although I would move back to California two years later, this experience would have a profound impact on my self-esteem and self-realization.  Somehow, this experience marked the beginning of growing into my full self; into the woman that I was meant to be – a woman who would finally come to know and appreciate her full worth, intelligence and beauty, even if the rest of the world refused to.