Editor’s Note: Featured images for op-eds will often depict pop cultural references to the topic at hand. The image used here was a still from the movie Precious, which explored how the main character (played by the actress Gabourey Sidibe) navigated messages of uglification, misogynoir, and fatphobia. It was not meant as a statement about the actress, and we apologize for our lack of clarity. The image has since been changed.
About two months ago, I inhaled some good ol’ city-polluted oxygen, took a puff of a freshly rolled joint, and changed my instagram name to @the.ugly.black.woman. Almost immediately, Black women in my inbox and on my feed rushed to admonish and uplift me.
“You should have higher self-esteem,” one systa asserted.
“I hate that such a beautiful Black woman would call herself such a horrible name,” another complained.
“Girl, what the hell is wrong with you naming your page that?! You are gorgeous,” another questioned.
Though their comments could be read as policing or chastisement, I understood that they come from a place of emphatic self-love. And the righteous and worthy desire to fight the ways that Black women have been dragged, trampled, and uglified in the face of anti-Blackness and misogynoir.
I didn’t change my name to @the.ugly.black.woman because I actually believe that I am ugly. I changed my name to acknowledge the ways that my body, and bodies like mine, continue to be uglified by agents and stewards of the white supremacist, anti-Black patriarchy.
As a child in elementary and middle school, I couldn’t go from one classroom to another without multiple children making fun of my appearance. Sometimes, they physically assaulted me in the process. They would repeatedly ask me why my teeth looked so weird, why my skin was so dark, why my forehead protrudes, why my hair didn’t grow, why my eyes were so tight, why my body was so fat and why I was so damn ugly.
They would play games like “The Vanessa Touch” – a form of tag where people who got caught were cursed with looking like me until they gave The Vanessa Touch to someone else. I experienced this violence every day.
One day I approached my agent to better understand the rejection of an audition I thought was outstanding and she comforted me by telling me that it was about my looks, not my talent. She encouraged me to consider caricature roles like the gangsta girls and pregnant teens since I could practically play “any role”, except you know, the ones I actually wanted to play.
Even my father would frequently warn me that no one would want to hire, date, or have sex with me if I didn’t change my appearance. And I believed him because boys didn’t give me the time of day unless they were using me to clown their homeboys, get homework support, or vent their pain, fears, insecurities and dreams to me in secret.
When I attended college, I found myself having sex with almost anyone who sweet talked me. I didn’t feel like I had the right to reject anyone because I (incorrectly) thought so few people wanted me. Sex became an access to affirmation rather than an experience for pleasure.
And in December 2018, I learned that if you googled Ugly Black Women, my picture would be the second one you’d find (thank Black lesbian Jesus that has since changed). This happened after a Black man in my own town uploaded a picture of me on Facebook to make a point about unattractive women attempting to gain access to VIP areas of hip hop stars’ after parties.
Uglification stole a significant portion of my youth. I regularly dreamed and fantasized about looking different, switching bodies and dying.
Uglification taught me to be afraid of people, that I was not only unsafe and unprotected in public, but that I wasn’t welcome in my community. And for a while I believed it because the bullying and insults were inevitable, exhausting, and made it hard for me to imagine a future existence.
Unlike so many other uglified children, I survived. Though folks in my world told me I was ugly, I always had someone – my mom, a best friend, a teacher, a counselor, a dope ass classmate – loving me and rooting for my survival.
I am passionately in love with myself today, but it was damn hard getting here. I had to intentionally unlearn nearly everything I was socialized to believe about bodies, worth, beauty, and myself. I had to understand and then believe that oppression, and especially internalized oppression, is real and not just a theory or concept.
Scientists, doctors and politicians have subliminally and overtly weaponized Black appearances and intelligences to justify their positions of power. That propaganda, under the veil of research, has been used to perpetuate racist ideas, practices, and policies that adversely and intrusively impact the quality of our lives. Consequently and unfairly, our behavioral choices don’t just reflect each other. They impact each other.
This behavior is not just limited to people in far off positions of power. It happens in our own community. The world is shallow, judgmental, and constantly belittling and laughing at the most marginalized, systematically disenfranchised, and historically oppressed folks. And many Black women fall into those categories, especially those of us who are not cis, straight, thin/medium sized, able bodied, economically affluent, light or medium brown complexioned, and neurotypical.
I love and respect us, especially those of us who are women, who are queer, who are trans and non-binary, who are fat, who are disabled, who are survivors, who are weirdos, and who are striving to create an existence where we can experience comfort, joy, and dignity.
I changed my name to create opportunities for people to confront the biases, fears, privileges, and values that inform their own belief about who or what is ugly – especially as it relates to their relationships with their own bodies and people who are more impacted by oppression than them.
I did it to hold space for the concrete impact of that uglification has on our mental health, physical well-being, financial health, families, access to safety and love, and interpersonal relationships.
I did it in solidarity with other Black people who have been uglified, targeted, and harassed by our skinfolk for not fitting into the colonial beauty, gender and respectability norms that anti-Blackness force fed into our collective imagination.
I did it to assert that no one needs to change any part of their body in order to be worthy of love, inclusion, respect or the resources we need to live quality lives.
I did it to remind myself and anyone who will listen that ugly is not the opposite of beauty. Ugly is a much needed freedom from the aggressive expectation to conform to beauty standards or die trying.
“Ugly” people are excluded from careers, internships and medical residencies, as well as other routes towards financial security that beauty qualifiable people can access with ease. Ugly people are less favored by jurors. They are excluded on dating websites and within the romantic realm. They experience more harm babies and are ignored teachers.
Cultural hostility towards those of us deemed as ugly through public ridicule, comedic belittlement and bullying are rewarded. Society promotes and normalizes beauty-qualifiable people through hyper-visibility and celebration in the media and arts. Their features and appearances are studied and dissected as standards to achieve. Beauty service and commercial industries pressure people to maintain and actualize those standards.
Attaining beauty has been conflated with health and wellness, morality and self-love, and even social intelligence and professional capability. The conflation works to both disguise and normalize ugly-discrimination, making it easier to systemically gaslight uglified people into thinking their oppression and exclusion is a consequence of their failure to achieve exclusive beauty standards.
And the impact of being uglified has real, painful, and pervasive consequences, such as PTSD symptomology. It fuels ableism, health-centricity, racism, colorism, fatphobia, classism, homophobia and transphobia. As a Black woman who is impacted by several of these intersections, I’m terrified and ready to fight.
Me claiming my ugliness does not mean I am claiming to be the opposite of beautiful. I am claiming freedom from anti-Black standards of beauty, from ableism, fatphobia, classism, the patriarchy and all the ways they have and continue to colonize our beautiful and majestic bodies, lives, and possibilities.
When I claim ugly, I’m asking people to U(lift), G(lorify) and L(ove) Y(ourselves) above anyone else’s gaze, fear and prejudice.
When I claim ugly, I am committing to not let anyone or anything convince me to uglify any part of my body or my personhood ever again.
When I claim Ugly, I claim our right to live joyful, abundant lives.
Suggested Reading:
Ugly Laws: Disability in Public Susan M. Schweik. 2010.
Black People Cannot be Ugly. Greatist, 2019.
The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison. 2007.
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis is a queerdo-weirdo fat Black femme writer, healer, conjurer, and educator; a Faerie Goddess Mermaid Gangsta for the Revolution; the former Senior Editor for Black Girl Dangerous and Everyday Feminism; a community arts organizer; and the Founder/Head Mistress of the PleasureNess Literary Academy (for Expressive Arts and Collective Liberation). The PleasureNess Lit Academy’s website is still in development, but please visit it anyway and sign up for the mailing list – magical treats await you.
