Misogynoir

The Most Disrespected Person. 1

"The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman" -  Malcolm X

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Disrespected, unprotected, and neglected.

I've always felt like these were normal occurrences in life.

People just don't like people, or most especially me.

I've watched the movies and read the books of bullied girls and boys, because they wore glasses, cared too much about school, were too big or too tall or too skinny or too small.

There was always a reason, it was never just that they were unlikeable.

In the end, you learn it was rarely about those things at all. It was about jealousy, a hidden crush, personal insecurities... its almost always personal insecurities, and it drives a person to treat another with malice.

So growing up, I always thought the reason no one liked me was because of my hair.

It couldn't have been the color of my skin, because my mother always told me it was the most beautiful shade of brown. I believed her because she was my mother and I trust her, but I always thought her dark smooth skin was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. So, if she, of all people, told me my skin was beautiful I believed her.

I wasn't by far the slimmest person in school or the widest. There were many girls, dark, light, and white, who were both wider and slimmer than I. I was short but not the shortest. I was brown as were many of the other Black girls or the tanned, made up white girls.

The only thing I could see that stood out about me was my hair.

It was not as curly as the other Black girls but not as straight as the white girls.

My hair didn't fall like the white girls, but it never fro'd like the Black girls.

It wasn't as thin or as thick as either side, It was kind of in a class of its own.

The only other people with hair remotely similar to mine had been the girls with a white parent and a Black parent. Even their hair has differences.

My father had hair most similar to mine, his words. You couldn't tell because it was always cut short and wavy, under a do-rag, and at one point done up in twisties?

Anyways, at school girls always asked me if I were mixed, and I told them no, because I'm not. I don't have to be mixed to have longer curls.

My best friend, Clem, told me that the white girls didn't like me because they thought I wanted to be like them. This was mainly whenever I would flat iron my hair, so I stopped.

Then she told me the black and mixed Black girls didn't like me because I tried to be like them when I would wear my hair curly.

After that, I just decided to do whatever I felt like with my hair and dedicate my efforts to ignoring them.

My best friend, Clem, she was also an oddball. She had slightly lighter skin than me, closer to the mixed girl, but she had 2 Black parents. She had bigger lips than I did, smaller but darker eyes than I, and her hair was more of a 4B, 4C type where mines was more in the 3's.

No one really knew where to place her, so I placed her with me and she placed me with her. That's how we became best friends.

They didn't like that she had light skin but not mixed or white, had big lips and coily hair but was not dark.

At the time, I thought disliking someone for the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, or their facial features was the same as disliking someone for being obese or because of the basketball team they rooted for. It was all just another reason.

Until I got a bit older.

In high school, I noticed all the boys would flirt a lot with white girls, or mixed girls, would give light-skinned girls or brown girls like me a nice conversation, but whenever they were around darker girls it was all jokes and teasing.

They were meaner and more aggressive than they were with me.

I thought it was really just this normal thing. I thought these girls- they didn't like them because they were mean.

Although I accepted all of these things, it never felt right to me. I tried to justify it as "it is what it is" but I could never look past the behavior I witnessed.

Where I'm from, couples consist of Black men and Black women together, hardly any mixed couples. When they were mixed, It was almost always a white woman and a Black man.

So it was always the question in the back of my mind "do the boys in my school prefer white girls?"