on beauty

Growing up as a dark-skinned Black girl in predominantly white suburbs in New Jersey and Michigan, I was convinced of nothing more than my own ugliness.

When I was six years old, armed with a can-do attitude wildly out of proportion with what I could actually do, I reached up one afternoon toward an electric kettle that was within my reach but beyond my control, and brought down a quart of boiling water onto myself. I had second-degree burns covering nearly the entire surface area of my right upper leg. Once I got past the searing pain, and the stages of healing when my thigh looked like raw chicken skin, all I could think about for years afterward was how I would never be able to wear shorts or skirts or a swimsuit ever again. I didn’t want to be seen, so I hid behind and inside books instead.

Indeed, I was a bookish youngster, good at being a student, and, because of that, certain things accrued to me. Adults liked me, but adults weren’t who I was going to marry. As a child, I imagined that getting married and having kids someday were the greatest things that I could aspire to. “Marriage,” though, was something that young me understood you could only access through “dating”. It seemed to me that “dating” was a thing that only happened to girls who were pretty, and “pretty” was a category that I did not know how to penetrate.

In seventh grade, I drew up the courage to ask out an eighth grader whom I knew from band. I played trumpet. He was a percussionist. I knew that people went out with each other at my middle school, but I didn’t know how exactly that happened. I had never before seen it done. I approached the percussionist one day at the bus stop on our way home from school and said, “Hi…um…will you go out with me?” He responded, “Aw, that’s so sweet! But no.” I could see the pity in his eyes. I learned years later that this particular percussionist wasn’t into women or girls at all. But I didn’t know that then; I assumed he just wasn’t into me. So I smiled quietly, held my head up, turned on my heel, walked off toward the school bus…and never asked anyone out again until I was 25 years old.

Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to wait that long before I started dating. My senior year of high school, walking through the halls after a Mock Trial practice, I ran into Patrick. Patrick was a Black boy, African American, from Detroit. He had been in my debate class a year prior, before he graduated. He started to show me a form of attention that I was completely unaccustomed to. Convinced that this was not possible, I made up an elaborate story in my head that he was doing research of his own, for a psychology class in community college, on how someone would react if you pretended to be romantically interested in her and then revealed one day that it had all been a ruse. I kept expecting the hidden cameras to pop out at any moment, but they didn’t. Instead, Patrick became my secret boyfriend — because my Ghanaian immigrant parents were not trying to hear that — and set me on the course to becoming the person I am today.

This is the story of how dating ruined my life…and how research saved it. How having a boyfriend did not resolve my desire to be pretty but rather exacerbated all my fears about my own ugliness. How, in the end, I learned to understand beauty in a whole different way. How studying my pain did not exactly make it go away but did open up brand new spaces for joy. And how research can do the same thing for you.

Ugly

Patrick was the first person I ever met, outside of my family, who said that he loved me. Patrick’s mom was the first adult I ever met, in or outside of my family, who didn’t like me. 

As an avowed nerd, I was accustomed to the adoration of my friends’ parents. I was the “good influence on their child” whom they all loved, because those adults sensed a fundamental truth: I was the friend who had neither the interest, the knowledge, nor honestly the capacity ever to lead their children astray. My strict and traditional West African parents had taught me only two ways to be: polite and obedient. When my older sister got Bs and Cs, my parents reacted with what was truly an undue amount of concern, given that she was at the time in fourth grade. I determined from early on that I would distinguish myself, and avoid my parents’ ire, by being the perfect daughter. This, from what I could tell, meant getting all “A”s for the rest of my life. That and doing only what my parents said. My parents, that is, and my teacher, because the teacher was the one authority greater even than the parents in that Ghanaian immigrant household.

The one time that I had not listened to my mother was when she told me to wait just a minute for her to come and pour the hot water for my mug of Swiss Miss. I hadn’t waited. Now I had a scar on my leg the shape, and I was sure the size, of the ENTIRE CONTINENT OF AFRICA to remind me of what happened to Ghanaian American girls who didn’t listen to their immigrant mothers. It rendered me literally incapable of doing the wrong thing. For that, my parents’ friends adored me.

But Patrick’s mom was different. She would stare at me silently and unsmilingly. She would not greet me when I went to her home to visit or look in my direction, even, to acknowledge that I had arrived. She would seldom speak to me, in fact, except to say, without a breath or a beat, “Don’t lean against my wall,” while she lectured me about how I should be attending her church rather than the Kingdom Hall with my Jehovah’s Witness mom. Patrick’s mother was an adult, and I, from what I could tell, was still the same lovable nerd-child that I had always been. But her behavior toward me didn’t read like adoration. I couldn’t understand why. 

Puzzled, I talked with Patrick about it one day. After thinking for awhile, he shared with me the one thought that likely changed the course of my entire life. “You know,” he said, “My mom has never liked any of my dark-skinned girlfriends.” I will remind you here that Patrick and his mother were Black—brown-skinned even, mere shades lighter than I am. The distinction, though, seemed meaningful enough to her, or at least to him, that it could explain her coldness toward me. 

This really came into relief one afternoon, when I brought my friend Anjali by Patrick’s house to hang out. Anjali was Gujarati. She had grown up in Canada and India before landing in the same sixth grade classroom as me in Plymouth, Michigan. Her family lived a mile down the street from mine, and for years our lives moved in parallel, right down to the secret boyfriend that she had at the same time I started dating Patrick, also in secret, because my parents were not trying to hear any of that. Anjali’s hair was longer and straighter and silkier than mine. Her eyes were bigger and rounder. Her nose was narrower, and her skin — perhaps most importantly in Patrick’s household — was lighter even than Patrick and his mom’s.

Patrick’s mother was beside herself. For the first time ever, I saw her face light up with a smile when she opened the door. She greeted us warmly. She asked if she could take our jackets. She offered to make us popcorn. She said, “Patrick, why don’t you introduce me to your friend?” The way I remember it, she batted her eyelashes with the drama of Minnie Mouse. The contrast was stark. I was floored. And this was just the beginning. I went away to college in Philadelphia later that year, and Anjali stayed to go to the University of Michigan. She and Patrick hung out a couple of times more when he, a talented pianist, accompanied her singing for one occasion or another. After one practice around the piano in Patrick’s family’s living room, Patrick’s mom approached him and said, “Why don’t you date Anjali instead of Afia?” and he responded with a smile, “C’mon, mom! Anjali wouldn’t want to date me.” For any of you listening for dating tips, note that this is not the correct response. The right answer, should your mother ever suggest that you date your present girlfriend’s current best friend, is that you already have a girlfriend whom you love. And maybe even to encourage your mom to grow to love her, too.

But this was not the stage where Patrick was in his development. Instead, he was at the stage where he told me all of these stories. And I was at the stage where I listened and sunk deeper and deeper into my own insecurity. Here I was, finally doing the elusive “dating” that I had believed for so many years could get me all of the things that I wanted, and instead it was driving home even further a sense of my own ugliness.

It is not that I was unfamiliar with colorism. We have it in Ghanaian and Ghanaian American communities, too. I was used to my mom and aunties fawning over light-skinned celebrities in Ebony magazine. What I was not used to was them behaving poorly toward someone because she was dark. This was the source of my pain, the understanding that the way I was treated in the world might have more to do than I realized with how I looked. I didn’t have the emotional tools that I do now to deal with this pain. And so, bookish youngster that I had always been, I decided I would study it instead.

Research 

When I went to Penn, I had applied directly into the Wharton School of Business. I was certain, at the age of 17, that I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I would open a small business buying groceries for families and cooking them meals, in their own homes, that I could leave in their fridges and freezers for them to eat for the week. It is, in fact, the very thing that I wish someone were doing for me right now. I did just fine my first semester in business school, but when I went to look over my four-year plan in preparation for a meeting with my advisor, I realized how quick I was to fill up my elective with language and literature and theatre courses, and how reluctant I was to engage in the core curriculum of finance and operations information management.

So I went to my advisor, Dr. Bill Whitney, and told him that I was thinking of switching out of Wharton. Much to my surprise, he said, “Sure. No one actually needs an undergraduate business degree. If you decide at the end of all this that you want to study business, you can always get an MBA.” I called my parents to float the idea of their daughter as a business-school-dropout and opened the conversation by saying, “Dr. Whitney says it’s okay!” Recall that, in my Ghanaian immigrant household, the teacher was the one authority greater than the parents, so imagine my surprise, again, when my parents said, “That white man doesn’t have your best interests at heart!” But my strategy nonetheless seemed to have an influence on them; they did not tell me that I couldn’t do it. And so the very next semester, I filled my entire schedule with courses in the College of Arts & Sciences.

One of these was an upper-division African American literature class that I didn’t realize was upper-division, because the course numbering system was different in the College than it was in Wharton. The instructor of that class, Dr. Herman Beavers, would later become a dear mentor and colleague and friend of mine, and would say to people on a number of occasions—one just last weekend—that if he had realized I was a freshman, he never would have let me in. Luckily for us both, he must not have read the roster very carefully. So that is how it came to be that I entered another moment that would change my life forever.

Dr. Beavers was the faculty coordinator for the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship program at the University of Pennsylvania. Now the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, or what we still call fondly “MMUF,” the two-year cohort program was designed to provide undergraduate research opportunities to students of color so that they could go on to pursue PhDs and diversify the ranks of college and university professors. That particular semester, almost all of the senior Mellons were in my seminar with Dr. Beavers. One day, at the end of class, they surrounded me. “What do you want to do after college?” they asked me, and I had an answer ready. 

Just the week prior, I had thought about this question myself. Being in that African American literature seminar felt so right to me that I had decided I would be an English major. And if I got an English major, there were only two things that I could imagine doing: becoming a journalist or getting a PhD. So I looked up at this circle of seniors and said to them with the confidence of a recent convert, “I want to get a PhD.” It turned out, for Mellons, that this was exactly the right answer. So the seniors told Dr. Beavers and together they spent the next semester recruiting me to join MMUF.

What they told me is that the program gave me the opportunity to research anything I wanted. Still in the midst of dating Patrick and hearing stories about how his mother was wishing me away, I decided that I would use this research fellowship to study beauty. With my family and Anjali’s in mind, I designed a project examining the relationship between ideals of beauty and ideals of femininity in contemporary Black and South Asian American literature. If I could understand how women were differentially valued in brown-skinned communities in the U.S. because of their appearance, then maybe it would illuminate why Patrick’s mother was the way she was, and eliminate her hold on my own sense of worth. I thought that maybe by researching my pain, I could make it go away.

Beautiful

That undergraduate project was the start of 20 years of studying beauty. When I went to visit PhD programs that I had gotten into, with the help of MMUF, I made one stop at the University of Southern California. I remember that day it was 34 degrees when I stepped onto the plane in Philadelphia and 76 degrees when I stepped off of the plane in LA. My graduate student host took me straight to the Venice Beach boardwalk, where I saw R&B singer Eric Benet stroll by with his daughter. The faculty sought to woo me by letting me know that they had a colleague in the School of Communications who was an expert in beauty pageants. If I came to their school, I could study with her. 

Startstruck as I was by the weather and Eric Benet and all the rest of it, I told USC no thank you. I was studying beauty, not beauty pageants. Plus, what I didn’t tell them is that when Patrick—who I was still dating at this time—discovered that I had gotten into three graduate schools in California and two in Michigan, he made his preference clear. “After all this time away at college in Philadelphia,” he said, “Are you going to go even farther instead of coming back and giving us a chance?” Four years after we had started dating, I still believed him to be my only chance at marriage and kids and the future that I had always wanted. So on April 15, 2002, I accepted a place in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and I went back home.

My second semester in graduate school, I took an Asian American Literary Theory seminar for which the final assignment was not to produce a research proposal for a project that we might do in the future. As I started doing preliminary searches for “African American”, “Asian American”, and “beauty”, a small number of texts started to come up about beauty pageants. I started to realize that researching pageantry would allow me to continue examine ideals of femininity and beauty, but now in the context of how those things interacted with national identity. What made this clearest to me was one book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, written by the nation’s foremost scholar on pageantry at the time, one Sarah Banet-Weiser, the very faculty member at the Annenberg School of Communications whom I could have worked with if I had gone to USC. This especially stung when, a year and a half into my time back in Michigan, I finally broke up with Patrick, y’all. Every Ann Arbor winter, there was at least one day when my nose hairs would freeze and the wind would bite at my face so hard that I would cry all the way home. On those days, I would think of LA and whom I might have become if I hadn’t been so afraid of letting go of who I already believed myself to be.

I ended up studying beauty pageants after all. I traveled to Miss Michigan and Miss India Michigan and Miss Black & Gold and Miss Black USA and Miss US Latina and Miss Gay America pageants to observe and take field notes and photographs during Pageant Weeks—the seven days of rehearsals, sponsor visits, preliminary rounds, and other activities leading up to the final night of competition. I went to the Miss Asian America Pageant so many times that they put me on staff as a “House Sister”, which meant that I got to carry the sashes around all day and iron them at night, among various other things.

One day, in the mail, just weeks after I had decided to start studying pageantry, I got a flier that said, “You could be the next Miss Universe or Miss USA!” It seemed like a sign from the universe indeed, and so I entered the Miss Michigan USA pageant and became then, and will forever be, Miss Washtenaw County USA 2004.

I prepared for that pageant by getting a coach, who taught me how to walk and wave. During one session, I showed her the Sally Hansen spray-on make up that I planned to use to cover up the burn scar in the shape of the ENTIRE CONTINENT OF AFRICA on my leg. “What scar?” she asked me, “I never noticed.” When I showed her, she said, “I don’t think you need to worry about that.” So weeks later I got up on stage in front of hundreds of people, wearing a swimsuit, without covering up my leg. And when I watched the video back, I couldn’t see the scar either.

I didn’t win that pageant. I didn’t even place. But like so many other moments that had come before — the burn, the boyfriend, the breakup, the literature courses, the decision to go back home — it changed my life forever. What it taught me was to expect change. So I’m going to save you years on this whole thing: expect change. Be humble. Know what questions you are trying to answer, but don’t miss out on your chance to go to USC to study with the nation’s preeminent scholar on beauty pageants just because at the age of 21 you think you know exactly what you have set out to learn. You can never already know all about the thing that you have set out to learn, because that’s not how learning works — like, by definition. You have to start from not knowing and then get to knowing in order to have learned something. Because that is what “learning” means. 

Cultivate an unquenchable thirst for learning, especially about yourself. Find your fear. Find your joy. Study them. To study them, you first have to know them and articulate them. Engage in introspection every day. Observe and write about yourself. Learn what your sore spots are and name them. Learn what you are most centrally afraid of and name it. Learn what are your greatest, and healthiest, sources of happiness. Seek them out. Research your pleasure. Research your pain. Make you your own longitudinal study. Study yourself. Learn yourself. Know yourself. Then as you inevitably change, do it all over again…for as long as you live.

Find your pain. Mine did not go away. Well, some of it has and some of it hasn’t. The world doesn’t work any differently than it did before; I just understand the workings of it better. While, at moments, that still makes me sad, other people and their prejudices do not have the kind of hold on me that Patrick’s mom — and the regional, national, and global cultures that made Patrick’s mom — did then. 

I am beautiful; I know that now. And I have research to thank.