Beauty Questions

My heart ached when I read Trey Anthony’s piece on For Harriet encouraging black women and especially black fathers to praise little black girls about their beauty. She shares her own story:

I vividly remember when I was their age how I wanted someone to call me pretty, or beautiful. How I ached for someone to just see me. How I wanted someone, anyone, to just notice me.

In my own need to be desired, wanted and told that I was beautiful, I stayed in beds that were not safe spaces for me.

I cried for this young lady. But I also wondered how something that was considered unimportant in my family and vain in the Christian culture I grew up in could be so important to not only Trey Anthony but other women as well.

I think of my own story of beauty. My father never or if ever…