Skin Color
My first notice of skin color came when I started to notice that some of my relatives had darker skin than my mother, my siblings and myself. I specifically noticed it when I took note of the cinnamon-brown skin of my favorite female cousin and her little brother one day when the three of us were playing in their family's basement.
At the time, I was naïve enough to blame the difference in skin color on sunlight. If only I had spent more time in the sun, I reasoned, I would be as dark as my two cousins and I would be normal.
Please note that last part.
My first response to the fact that my two cousins had darker skin than me was not: “Oh my God! I'm related to dark-skinned people.”
It was: “If my skin was as dark as theirs, I would be normal. I'd fit in. I'd belong.”
And I wanted desperately to belong, to fit into a group which at the time I considered to be perfect.
Of course, as I grew up, I realized that this was not a normal response. A normal light-skinned person was not supposed to envy the skin color of a dark-skinned person. True, there were tanning salons, but it was just accepted in all too many areas of American society -- even the most liberal areas -- that dark skin was only acceptable when it was temporary. When it was permanent, it just wasn't that fashionable.
Of course, my relatives never promoted this idea for obvious reasons. And part of the reason I envied their skin color undoubtedly lay in that fact. For that matter, I was influenced a lot by the pride my dark-skinned cousins seemed to have in themselves. They weren't perfect, but in my childish eyes, they might as well have been. Whenever my siblings and I were tempted to slack off in school, my Polish-American mother would inevitably talk about how my Aunt O_____ (my favorite cousin's mother) always insisted on her children finishing their homework and how many of them were honor students as a result. In other words, when my mother wanted us to do well in school, she did not cite one of her own relatives as an example to emulate; she cited relatives on the Mexican side of the family.
And I never realized how odd this was until I was much older.
My first notice of skin color came when I started to notice that some of my relatives had darker skin than my mother, my siblings and myself. I specifically noticed it when I took note of the cinnamon-brown skin of my favorite female cousin and her little brother one day when the three of us were playing in their family's basement.
At the time, I was naïve enough to blame the difference in skin color on sunlight. If only I had spent more time in the sun, I reasoned, I would be as dark as my two cousins and I would be normal.
Please note that last part.
My first response to the fact that my two cousins had darker skin than me was not: “Oh my God! I'm related to dark-skinned people.”
It was: “If my skin was as dark as theirs, I would be normal. I'd fit in. I'd belong.”
And I wanted desperately to belong, to fit into a group which at the time I considered to be perfect.
Of course, as I grew up, I realized that this was not a normal response. A normal light-skinned person was not supposed to envy the skin color of a dark-skinned person. True, there were tanning salons, but it was just accepted in all too many areas of American society -- even the most liberal areas -- that dark skin was only acceptable when it was temporary. When it was permanent, it just wasn't that fashionable.
Of course, my relatives never promoted this idea for obvious reasons. And part of the reason I envied their skin color undoubtedly lay in that fact. For that matter, I was influenced a lot by the pride my dark-skinned cousins seemed to have in themselves. They weren't perfect, but in my childish eyes, they might as well have been. Whenever my siblings and I were tempted to slack off in school, my Polish-American mother would inevitably talk about how my Aunt O_____ (my favorite cousin's mother) always insisted on her children finishing their homework and how many of them were honor students as a result. In other words, when my mother wanted us to do well in school, she did not cite one of her own relatives as an example to emulate; she cited relatives on the Mexican side of the family.
And I never realized how odd this was until I was much older.
Labels: Biculturalismo, Color de Piel, Familia, Mexicano-Estadounidenses, Sol
posted by Tonio Kruger at 12:24 PM
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