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While having dinner with two former students of mine, I was again moved by the poem that asked, Who will care for the Black child? It is a poem from the movie Antwoine Fisher. That question seared into me, when thinking of a young couple I assisted in some small way to prod through school and get their degrees.
     As I sat with these two now-educated young Black people, the young lady was a very beautiful young Black lady, but I sensed that her beauty was elevated beyond reasonableness--to a level of expectation because of physical beauty alone, which, in America, often causes one to suspend rational thought about who she is and what life should hold for her because of her looks.
     As I listened to the young lady, I thought something must be wrong with me until the other student and I talked afterward, and he acknowledged that nothing was wrong with me, but it was her unreasonable reliance on her beauty and her ban overblown expectation because of it.
     In spite of what society and this culture has said in the past or says now, Black women have always been beautify, they always knew it, and so did we all, as we luxuriated in the abundance of our brown sugar. Throughout American history, there was no system of torture or brainwashing that could make the vast majority of us think that we were not beautiful or that our beauty was  a novelty; it was who we were and are--nothing special. 
     But when did it occur to us that our ancient physical beauty was something more important than anything else? When did our beauty become exceptional? When did it become worthy of our touting beyond its worth? 
     This American touting of physical beauty and its hyperbolized importance seem to have become a concept that has taken root in  many of our young Black people--so they are beautiful, and is that all they have to be; beautiful.   
     As I sat at dinner with my two former students, enjoying the fact that they had mastered academia instead of it mastering them, I was brought to a sudden halt, as an unusual emphasis was placed on the import of beauty the young woman exulted. She, seemingly, assumed that beauty would unlock more doors than it will and than it should.  That she was beautiful was undeniable, but she was among others who were also physically beautiful and saw their beauty as the norm and understood that the mind was of greater beauty and worth than their transitory physical beauty.
    Physical beauty is pleasant to look at; indeed, it is a quality that appeals to the sense of sight and usually has more effect on those given to sensory perceptions than those given to cognitive reasoning. Yet this type of beauty is very time-limited and quickly changeable with time and circumstances. It is transitory and not to be relied on by reasonable persons for more than the fleeting moment that it exists. And moments come and moments go.
     Because Botox and an entire army of technologies for making people other than who they are, many of the "beautiful people" have staked their human worth on transitory physical beauty. And this once-strange ethos has branched beyond them and taken root in many of our young Blacks. Being beautiful, to them, is all there is, and they expect beauty to propel them to some great status. Many actually assume that beauty merits favor simply because they have it. And to the naive, it does, but to the intelligent it does not.
     Beauty is not a new thing to Black people--our beauty is  ancient and universally known; before there was an America, Black people were beautiful and seen as such by the civilized world. So in this day of feminism and equality, a brother or sister may be beautiful, gorgeous, perfect, or any term currently used to describe another person who is configured physically in a way that is pleasant to the eyes of others, but the pleasure of beauty is short-lived if physical beauty is all that one has. And since beauty has not been a quality overly touted by Black people throughout our history, why is it now something that many Blacks are behaving so strangely about? Beauty is from birth, so why not strive for and tout those other aspects that are more lasting and important than physical beauty? 
     Black people must again come to a historical realization that while beauty is often vain and deceptive, intelligence is a more sure and stronger beauty than physical beauty. And anyone who is deceived by physical beauty is unwise.    
     Finally, when looking for a life-companion, intelligent men and women will always ask of the physically beautiful person, "What else have you got?" And when there is nothing else to be offered, or nothing else that can be perceived, physical beauty becomes his shame, being alone! 

 

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