WHY LUPITA IS IMPORTANT

Lupita Nyong’o is important. She is as important as Nelson Mandela was in 1994, as Barack Obama when he became the first black president of a country like America and just as important as Ellen Joan Sirleaf was when she became the first African female president in Liberia.

My brilliant sister (Anele Tshabalala) and fearless cousin (Linda Zwane) and I got into it, well as much as anyone can get into anything with anyone, on Facebook with someone who described Lupita as looking like a man who has a disgusting hairstyle. She obviously chose to ignore all the many reasons Lupita is being honoured and celebrated. If you don’t understand the intricacies of a certain topic it is perfectly alright to sit that conversation out instead of offending everyone, even yourself with half-baked theories on black girls reconciling their identities with beauty.

As a young girl I read fairytales, voraciously so, and for the longest time I believed the truth about stories I couldn’t really identify with. Cinderella was white with blonde hair, Snow White was white with black hair, Little Red Riding Hood, well she didn’t have red hair, that was her just her cape but she too was white. Black girls finally get a real life heroine who is living what can only be described as a fairytale, if those Jared Leto rumours are to be believed. She is necessary because her existence and her achievements are telling girls who look like her that they get a happy ending too.

 Now black girls celebrating other black girls takes nothing away from beautiful and successful women of other races. It certainly doesn’t give anyone the right to say ‘whatever you all pray to God you get a white man anyway hahahaha’.

Race

Just because you judge people based on the colour of their skin and make one race something you aspire to be a part of even if it is an in-law it does not mean that everyone else does, especially the ones who are simply overjoyed at the prospect of the world loving them in the skin they were born in.
I watched a documentary two months ago about the feelings black people have towards their hair and children as young as four years old said they hated being called black because it meant they were ugly. When shown two pictures, one of a white woman and the other of a black woman and told to pick the woman they thought was beautiful they all chose the white woman.

Unless you understand all the nuances of being black but not quite being beautiful you do not have the right to water down the importance and the impact that a girl from Kenya, fresh out of Yale has made on the world by daring to pursue her dreams in her glorious skin and the world letting her.

Which is another problem; the world letting her, for the longest time we have waited on the world to validate what we think is beautiful which has been so detrimental to the advancement of the black girl, it blows my mind to even consider it. Because of these societal standards the term ‘yellow bone’ was born.

Black people, with their infinite creativity coined this term to further separate a race that would have done better had it held on to each other. If the world dictated that the more light-skinned you were the more beautiful you were then people would aspire to it.
Do not step to me sideways trying to talk down the necessity of having brown girls who look like Lupita on magazine covers and Academy Award stages because I will come for you.

For as long as I have younger sisters and a womb not yet occupied I will do my best to rid the world of as many bigots as possible. Acknowledging the beauty of a woman as aesthetically perfect as Lupita takes nothing away from you, opining that she is not beautiful to you is perfectly valid but do not let it be solely because she’s black.

Lupita is perhaps made more beautiful by the fact that in 2014 when almost the entire world claims to be advocating and upholding human rights by not being racist, she has shown us just how big a fallacy that is. Beware of people who love you only when you remain unthreatening.
Be the type of person who is deliberate in creating the type of world you want to live in - homophobes, white supremacists and sexists this isn’t to you - and then go about creating it.

The world needs more fierce, the world needs more fearless, the world needs you in all your undiluted, unphotoshopped, unlimited glory. Do not stop becoming.

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