I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, as the daughter of Indian immigrants – my father was dark-skinned and my mother was light-skinned. I was often asked: “Are you mixed?” My questioners seemed to assume an affirmative answer – surely I had to be the product of a black father and a white mother, a combination of the two known variables in Memphis. The insistent tone of these inquiries made me acutely aware at a young age of our human impulse to categorize and contextualize.
My mother has had her own experiences of being treated like a living puzzle, of strangers approaching her with a sense of entitlement, as if she owes them an accounting of her identity. People like to guess her ethnicity – she has been presumed Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Mexican, Native American and Caucasian. But actually she was born in Kashmir, India. Her complexion is, to quote the name of a famous Indian brand of skin-lightening products, “fair & lovely”.
When I was 11 we traveled to India. A large part of my excitement for the trip was tied to my assumption that India would afford me the luxury of being in an environment where my skin tone would not attract attention or questions. But that sense of peace faded a few days after arriving when my older female relatives began admonishing my mother for “letting” my skin become “so dark”.
It was a pity I had not inherited her coloring, they said, and she should keep me out of the sun if she wanted to preserve my attractiveness and, by extension, my marriageability.
Marriage was far from my mind at that age, but attractiveness was not. Memphis made for a whole set of mixed messages for a girl with light brown skin. My white friends spent long hours by the pool, attempting to make their skin color match mine, and yet I was still aware that this did not mean I was desirable.
On the other side of this dynamic were black women who routinely told me: “You have the prettiest skin,” a compliment that rendered me uncomfortable because some part of me knew that to accept praise for lighter skin was to reinforce the idea that what I had was more desirable than the darker tones of the women proffering the compliment.
It wasn’t until after I began exploring my attraction to women as well as men that I realized I had internalized the cultural message I had found so cringeworthy as a child: that lighter-skinned women were inherently more attractive. Initially, I thought that I wasn’t attracted to women with dark skin much in the same way that I wasn’t attracted to Asian men, shamefully oblivious of the extent to which biased (or absent) media representations had altered my own sense of desire.
The work of checking one’s assumptions is continuous, perpetual; there is no end point, no “arriving”. But, for me, becoming the parent of a black child certainly kicked the stakes up several notches.
When my wife, who is white, and I learned that Shiv’s birth mother, who is black, had selected us to be Shiv’s parents, we did not think specifically about how our future child’s skin tone would affect our parenting choices. Perhaps we were naive, or perhaps that felt like much too fine a point to paint given all of the overarching concerns we had about responsibly and thoughtfully raising a black child in America.
It wasn’t until Shiv, now six, began to express gender fluidity and a desire to present to the world as female that I felt a desperate sense to make sure that she did not internalize the same narratives about the superiority of light skin as I had. Beauty standards for women are so unforgiving and baked into our marrow as a society; Shiv’s connection to her body shape and size, her hair and skin tone, are all relationships to which my wife and I pay close attention.
The toughest thing for me is fighting the urge to panic when she says things like “I don’t like my color”, as she did once when she was four. This was around the same time that she had developed an intense interest in comic books and superheroes, a world that remains, on the whole, startlingly white.
Though my temptation was to immediately contradict my daughter’s sense of wanting to be other than what she is, I tried instead to listen and to validate what she was feeling. “There were times when I was younger that I didn’t want to be brown,” I told her. “You did?” she asked, surprised. “Yeah, I thought it would be easier to be white,” I admitted. Saying that truth aloud seemed to grant Shiv the space to move away from her despair.
These days, Shiv is full of pride when it comes to her skin; I truly think her recent switch to female pronouns and newfound opportunity to move through the world as “she” has allowed her to feel more at home in her own body in every sense.
Movement is a part of this; Shiv looks forward to dance class each week, at a studio which we chose, like our neighborhood, precisely because of its racial diversity. I love watching my child through the glass, surrounded by other dark-skinned bodies, powerful and free in their expression.
I desperately want to protect that pride Shiv has found, like a glass ornament so precious and fragile that it feels inevitable it will break. Perhaps I am being cynical because of my own experiences, or perhaps it’s just that Shiv will have to work through her own set of tricky feelings about her skin color, just as I did. But for now, I remain hopeful: the other day, when discussing how a particular color looked better on her than it did on me, she asked: “Do you sometimes wish you were black? Because being black is so cool.”
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