Awkward Cinderella

As a child I loved Cinderella, not the Disney version, the Brandy version. Everything about that film resonated with me. She looked like me, had braids and brown skin, I felt like I was alone even when I had people surrounding me,  I dreamed that Whitney Houston was my Godmother. I watched that movie over and over again. I'm pretty sure that I ruined the tape within the VHS. But I watched that movie so many times because no one else on television looked like me. Brandy did. Hunting the television for faces that resembled mine was something I eagerly did and something I subconsciously do now. I love watching films with black faces filling the screen, even if they submissively promote stereotypical images and ideas concerning the black family and identity. But it is true, I watch television looking for black people, counting how many black people I see, and then even more specifically how many black women I see on the screen. It is a habit that has limited the films, works of art, and outlets of media that I am exposed to, but that hunt is necessary. I can continue to internalize these ideas that black people do not exist (at least in movies) or I can keep looking.

As I became older I realized I was not Brandy. I was an awkward, goofy, loving girl with glasses too big for my face and a desire to please my immigrant family. I really have not changed much but my interactions with myself definitely have. I would go to the Dominican hair salon hoping that my short permed hair with some how turn into a head of long flowing hair down to my back. I would leave with hair that made a mushroom around my face, and a hope that when i got home I would be able to stretch the strands making them just a bit longer. When I looked at the boxes of no-lye relaxer at the beauty supply store or the hair magazines, i could not understand why my hair did not look the girls'. What was I doing wrong that my hair could not end up straight and long? For a long time that is what I thought I needed to be beautiful, long flowing hair. And no one ever told me differently. My mom did not know what to do with me, the television commercials did not help, and none of my friends knew any better. 

Images of black female beauty is something that has taken a lot of my media consumption, especially after I cut of all of my hair in 2010. I had no hair, nothing to obsess over, just a face that belonged to me and only me. After I shaved off all my hair, i realized that no one I have ever known looked like me at that very moment. I was a young black girl with no hair. So I became obsessed, looking onto social media, searching to see what black women looked like. And I do not mean the women that are on relaxer boxes, billboards, television, and movies, I mean real ones. I hunted through media looking for an other of the black female image. I needed to know that I was not the only black girl that felt completely detached from the black girls I saw everywhere. I learned the truth about hair and the black race. The love/hate relationship that black people have with their hair, how they cover it, enhance, dye it, love it, and embrace it. The good hair/bad hair dichotomy. But as we know things are not always so black and white.

As I constantly hunt for black faces, I now hunt for black women who change the construction of the black women, especially in the realm of beauty. In a world in which beauty is based on eurocentric traits, there is a void that needs to be filled. A void that reminds people that small noses and thin lips and light skin are not the only ways to define beauty. That is what I most often use mass media for, to find an other that does not seem like an other to me. 

"The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl" challenges mass media images of the black woman and an all around great show.

Awkward Black Girl