Thursday, May 27, 2010

MY LIPS ARE TOO BIG FOR MY FACE

Those words came from the mouth of my daughter when she was seven years old. I started this blog for her. I don’t want her to ever feel or think the way I did when I was her age. My weight and self-esteem issues lasted for many years. I was never skinny enough, my hair was never long enough, and for a few years my skin just wasn’t light enough.

We haven’t been celebrating ourselves. As Black women we have allowed the rest of the world to define us. We allow them to exploit certain parts of our body, to tell us what skin tone is acceptable, what facial structure is most beautiful and what type of hair is the most flattering. We have allowed others to think for us. As Black women we stand out from the rest. We were as unique in history as we are today.

Growing up I didn’t get the positive reinforcement I needed to be proud of who I really am. My parents did a fabulous job of raising me but it was the outside world that failed me. I rarely saw myself on TV or in magazines. When, and if, I did it wasn’t very often and it was a lighter, skinnier, straighter-haired version of myself. When I was growing up my parent’s generation had not joined the wave of celebration. My parents came from a country where they were not the minority. Looking or feeling a certain way about ones Blackness was not as big of an issue. When they moved to North America their revolution existed elsewhere. It was about being accepted at all. About proving to the rest of the world that you had a brain and were equal to them. The revolution for them was proving that Blackness did not equal failure.


The Big Booty Revolution is about celebrating the true you. It’s about telling the world that not only are you brilliant but you are also okay with who you are and that you don’t need outside approval.

When my daughter wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and sees that beautiful dark skin, those sensational thick lips, that mound of curly hair, that perfectly round nose and that fabulously protruding behind she should be proud. I want her to admire it; to celebrate the fact that its natural; coveted. She should be overjoyed by the amount of money she’ll save in plastic surgery and tanning alone! She’ll never need a tanning bed, a nose job, a butt implant, collagen in her lips or curlers and perms for that hair.

I want her to know that she is naturally perfect!

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