![]() America knows all too well the consequences of labeling Black girls as promiscuous there is no forgiveness or innocence awarded to Black girls who simply want to be children. Black girls live in a paradoxical state where they’re too ugly to be loved, yet too sexualized to be cherished. For me, ugliness spoke to being unimportant, unseen, and unheard as a child.īlack women have been called ugly for longer than we’ve been deemed human. At least that’s what the world finds new ways to tell me every day.” For Burke, the ugliness the world attached to her was physical. Being ugly, she said, is the “funny way that some people interact with those they deem physically unattractive … I know this because I’m ugly. Tarana Burke describes this phenomenon in a work I was introduced to during my first semester of sophomore year. What I did not realize was that the coming-of-age process for Black girls had an extra miserable layer: we were ugly, whether we believed it or not. ![]() So, I sat there alone, awaiting a punishment that I knew would be too strict. I was hypervisible – an unfortunate symptom of my ugliness. “She’s a distraction during study period.” It was as if my teachers couldn’t be bothered to hide their opinions of me. The door to her office was only slightly ajar, but I could hear everything. Her office, lacking personal touches and color, mirrored an interrogation room. I remember sitting at the principal’s round table, hands crossed in my lap. So, why couldn’t the school administrators see that? Why was I punished significantly more than other students for the same behavior? During my first suspension in middle school, I did not have the vocabulary to defend myself. I was a straight A student in a public charter school, but that was impossible to see when my behavior was always defined for me. My middle school years were defined by excessive in-school suspensions and meetings in the principal’s office. Growing up, I had never felt more invisible. Or, at least, that white society thought so.
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