There was one girl in our school whose mother made her wear a clothespin on her nose to make it thin. There were quite a few girls who tried to bleach their skin white with bleaching cream and who got pimples instead. And, of course, we went to the beauty parlor and got our hair straightened. I couldnât wait to go to the beauty parlor and get my hair all fried up. I wanted Shirley Temple curls just like Shirley Temple. I hated the smell of fried hair and having my ears burned, but we were taught that women had to make great sacrifices to be beautiful. And everybody knew you had to be crazy to walk the streets with nappy hair sticking out. And of course long hair was better than short hair. We all knew that.
We had been completely brainwashed and we didnât even know it. We accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty and, at times, we accepted the white manâs view of ourselves. We had never been exposed to any other point of view or any other standard of beauty. From when I was a tot, I can remember black people saying, âNiggas aint shit.â âYou know how lazy niggas are.â âGive a nigga an inch and heâll take a mile.â Everybody knew what âniggasâ like to do after they eat: sleep. Everybody knew that âniggasâ couldnât be on time; thatâs why there was c.p.t. (colored peopleâs time). âNiggas donât take care of nothing.â âNiggas donât stick together.â The list could go on.
To varying degrees we accepted these statements as true. And, to varying degrees, we each made them true within ourselves because we believed them.