Beauty inVisibility

by Huda Shulaiba

PREREADING (it’s not homework. Just Google it.): DuBois’s theory of doubleconsciousness. Look into the racial disparities in schizophrenia diagnoses while you’re at it. All of that is to say: no, I am not being paranoid or dramatic or overreacting.

Visibility is peculiar in its distribution. It’s one of those things in our lives that we take for granted, not realizing we have it until it’s gone, or vice versa. I think about visibility a lot these days, walking around a city that feels imbued with visibility, more opaque than the squat-proof Lululemon leggings I hear so much about. It’s a luxury afforded only to certain subsets of people. If you need me to enumerate to you which ones, my required reading list was way too short.

I recognize what I don’t have in short bursts before my mind makes the executive decision to go blank, turning to selective amnesia to protect itself from a constant state of despair. I don’t get to have random small interactions around here. Sometimes I think the fabric wrapped around my head makes people think I’m a robot, capable of nothing more than a routine greeting and occasional class discussion post. Back home, I’m average. I love being average. Being average means I don’t have to question my existence every time I walk to class alone. Here, no one even sees me. I’m not asking for hello or anything, but it’d be nice for them to at least try to acknowledge my presence just long enough to avoid running into me on the sidewalk.

When the guy standing in front of me waiting to get tested for COVID turned back to talk and joke in the interim, I had to grapple with the sudden awareness that he was the first person who had spoken to me like a real person since I’d moved back in. I had forgotten what it was like to be treated like a person and not a houseplant. To be casually spoken to and acknowledged and looked at rather than looked through. Let that sink in for a moment. I completely forgot what it was like to be casually spoken to, even greeted. We spoke for two minutes. Though we were prematurely interrupted when his name was called, it was the most enriching exchange I’d had with a stranger in months.

I notice other things, too. For one, no one says bless you when I sneeze in class. I thought I was being sensitive when I first suspected it, but I paid attention long enough to see every other sneeze in our small class of 23 was getting blessed. If I were going just off that class alone, I’d guess the only sneezes allowed to be blessed had to come from faces that pass the paper bag test.

ago. I had to lose 50 pounds just for someone to hold a door open instead of letting it shut in my face. Apparently, weight loss is the price you have to pay for everyday kindness.

People are caught off-guard by my jokes, my mean streak, my intellect. Every detail I reveal about myself is met with surprise as if being fat or brown or Muslim makes me incapable of sneaking into ice rinks and installing tile flooring in a neighbor’s shiny new green kitchen. Or, you know, just being a normal person.

I could go on about my mini moments of uncomfortably heightened consciousness, but you get it. The thing about invisibility is that no matter who you are or what you’ve done, you will always be denied the opportunity to even be assessed as a person. If anything, some are offered a cheap imitation of acknowledgment in the form of stereotypical role assignments, never given the option to be seen as human or whole, only as scraps of cherry-picked characteristics and warped-but-idealized traits.

This isn’t a pity party, and it’s not anything new. It just is. Those of us who fall on the wrong end of the visibility spectrum work around it. One method I’ve found to be particularly effective (if a bit disheartening) is to sprinkle in a “fuck” or two upon first meeting. The shock of hearing curse words come out of my mouth usually does the trick when it comes to reinstating my humanity in a peer’s eyes. I’m working on finding a better one. I’m kind of tired of my humanity being tied to a potty mouth. I don’t love the stink.

So. We have our workarounds. We assert ourselves into others’ lines of sight. We deal with it. The real effort lies in dealing with the image formed in the wake of our newfound visibility.

Eurocentric whitewashed beauty standards contribute to and uphold the invisibility of people like me. It’s something we’re all aware of on some level, some more cognizant of it than others. The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the average white woman has a better chance of being considered “beautiful” than most. For others, a ridiculous amount of effort is required to simply be acknowledged. Conventional beauty is one thing, but the standards bleed into every aspect of our lives, whether we like it or not.

We’ve all seen TikTok trends glorifying tiny, upturned noses or treating light-colored eyes like a Nobel Peace Prize or emphasizing how much better life is postweight loss. We’ve seen the same outfits being praised on models get ridiculed when put on bigger bodies. We all know the bar is lower for skinny white people to be seen as beautiful because they are the standard. It’s not hard to pass an exam written directly from your notes.

Nothing is absolute, of course, and there are plenty of exceptions, but the overwhelming pattern, especially for women of color, is that looking how you look is not enough. If we could quantify beauty in the eyes of society, beautiful women of color would be on the same tier as the average white blonde. (No offense intended to the average blonde, of course. You’re beautiful. It just sucks that your version of beautiful is the only kind allowed.) Ask around. If you get honest answers, you’ll see how common it is for women of color to fear being used for their “otherness” before being tossed aside for the first white girl who’ll glance at their significant other.

If you pay attention, you’ll easily notice how the key to being celebrated as “attractive” as a woman of color is either having white features or looking incredibly “exotic,” striking in a way that tears through our transparency. One lends itself to erasure, the other to fetishization and dehumanization. Both lead to the same conclusion.

I don’t care to be considered “beautiful,” I truly don’t. It’d be nice, I suppose, but it’s the least of my worries. I would like to be treated like a normal person, though. To be seen in the most literal sense of the word.

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with all this. I know what I’m doing with it, even if I can’t exactly verbalize it. Obviously, it’d be cool to move towards a future where this isn’t a thing (or, even better, one where physical beauty has minimal weight) but for now, we live with it. We work with it. We try to see what we can do to use it in our favor. We keep it moving.