I'm Just Pretty

"You're pretty for a black girl," is NOT a compliment!

Last night a guy I do not know asked me my ethnicity. I told him I am Palestinian and Black. He followed up with, "you're pretty for a black girl."

As a little girl, I considered myself pretty, maybe even gorgeous. I went to an elementary school that was diverse in color, language and culture. I blended in with all of the other beautiful mixes of colors. It wasn't until I moved in junior high school that I started to question if I was ever really pretty at all or if I was just part of the only thing I knew. I spent my most impressionable years in a predominately white community. My best friends, and the other groups of girls I desired so badly to be part of, were tall, slender babes with clear blue eyes and flowing blonde hair. I became a generally accepted kind of pretty. Adults saw my thick, kinky hair and freckles as additions to my cuteness and my peers were genuinely curious about my hair. I got asked to "touch my hair" a lot as if I was a featured piece in a museum. I never knew if I should take that as a compliment or be bothered that I was made out to be a show piece. I wasn't ugly, so I guess it was okay - that's what I told myself.

It wasn't until I got into eighth grade that I realized I wasn't pretty, but rather pretty with a caveat. The boys I wanted attention from only wanted the girls I ran in close circles with. They didn't want kinky hair, french braids or buns because I didn't know what else to do with my hair that I didn't know how to manage. I developed a complex I can only hope my (future) daughter never experiences. I didn't know who I was, who I should have been or who others wanted me to be. I felt short of mediocre in the outside world and a prized possession when I got home with my (Arab) family that always made me feel beautiful - but they are my family, that's their job right?

I did whatever I could to feel pretty - the kind of pretty I now believed to be genuine. I took hot tools to my luscious kinks, relaxed my hair to be as shiny and silky as ethnically possible. I was introduced to weaves and was so excited about being able to cover up my hair. I added ounces of silky hair that I would deny wasn't mine. (I still wear extensions and weaves, but for healthy reasons rather than to hide who I am and am not afraid to tell people.) I was determined to be "one of them." I tried to be white - only further confusing my sense of self as you can imagine. Transitioning into high school I decided to surround myself with more black people, people more like me, so I thought. Turns out, we weren't as alike as I had imagined. I became "too white" for the black crowd and "too black" for the white crowd. I spoke too white and was too "swaggy" all at the same time. (Even with relatives on my black side I was told to "not come around here talking like that," which resulted in them thinking I put myself on some higher level than them. In reality, I tried so hard to fit in with even my own family and never really felt accepted for my unique mix.) With my black friends I still "didn't understand the struggle and wasn't the same," and with my white friends I was the token cool black friend. I didn't realize someone's color or background made them cool. I guess they told me.

Now that I am an adult and have learned to genuinely love and flaunt my Black and Palestinian assets, I find that everyone around me are spending countless hours in the sun and getting lip injections to try to look like me. Ain't that a blip? The crimping iron became the white girl's best friend and freckles were being drawn on with makeup.

So, when someone tells me I am "pretty for a black girl," my inner little girl wants to curl up and cry. At the very basic level of the sentence, you do think I am pretty, exotic, ethnically ambiguous (that one is my favorite) because all of my beautiful differences make me pretty. Just pretty.