Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

With all that’s going on lately it has become too obvious that skin and hair colour matter when asking for help. We are getting news about people being rejected at the EU boundaries because they are not blond and blue eyes and thus they are not ukranian people. Even worse, we have politicians in Spain that agree with rehousing refugees from there because they come in peace but not the ones coming from Syria or southern countries allegating that they come here to invde us. No matter what color they all flee from war zones and try to survive. Yesterday the news here were about a black colour guy being beaten to the pulp because he tried to jump the fence between Marocco and Spain, and in the same time others crying to see blond children having to escape their cities through the fields. It becomes unbearable to see the hypocrisy of some politicians and even journalists that cover those news.

I know from a very young age that skin color matters but I expected it to be less and less obvious. As I see how some justify helping some and not others, I can’t help but wonder, when did we lose our humanity? Why are our origins so important in order to be helped or left to rot? How can we move on?

I have dealt with the racism part since I can remember. I was born in Colombia, but at the age of four we moved to Spain. Although it may not seem like it, it was very complicated. My family taught me the words I was not supposed to use, even if they were in Spanish, basically so they would not place me as Latin American, if I were asked about it I was to reply I was Canarian. Accents in Spain are very important, like you may have in English, and people can figure out where you come from just by the words you use. Back then it wasn’t a good thing being Colombian.

At school I learned very fast to ditch the nationality questions. I lived in Africa and there were many people in my class from many parts of the world. The European were like the high class, whilst natives, not so much. South American were OK, but not from Colombia. The jokes about drugs and cartels and mafia were constant. As if! So I used to say I was Spanish. Anyway they would not be able to figure me out by my accent, they all spoke French.

I always felt out of place at school, they were all blond or blue eyed, or jet black. So I was somewhere I had no reference. On TV all the shows were either French or American, in the eighties and nineties, the cultural representation was very poor, so I always felt like nothing. My Spanish friends knew me so they made no jokes, but they were not like me. I would go very tanned in the summer, which made my grandmother go crazy. She wanted me to be pale. She had what South American call the racial improvement syndrome, which is basically that if you are not blue eyed and blond but the opposite, what she called indigenous, you must try to have children lighter by marrying North European people. Therefore she hated me being so dark, small and then gay in the end. I would never breed better race.

I never thought about how bad it made me feel until way later, looking back at pictures of me when I was a teenager and a young adult. First it came when I had to wear contact lenses instead of glasses. I was already a geek so getting rid of the glasses was a good thing for me. I looked for the ones that changed your eye colour, I tried the blue ones, but my dark skin didn’t match. I looked like a zombie or a vampire, and I was no goth at all (again too dark skinned), so I used the green ones, which made my eyes olive coloured. Then I changed my hair color. Yes, I was blonde. For several years. And not like light hair color, platinum blonde. If only I had had my sister’s, she wasn’t that light, but she was OK, and she never had to endure my grandmother’s exigencies. Mine was jet black…

Honestly it was awful. I look at those pictures and I wonder why. Well I used to, now I know why. I didn’t want to be different, I wanted to be like the others. But I couldn’t. I was a cast off at school and in high school too, I was never popular, on the contrary, I was bullied and in the best case just ignored. I had very few friends. So somewhere inside me I thought it would be helpful to become like them. I hated being short, fatty, hairy and darker than them.

When I moved to Spain, before university, I kept those habits, but tried to fade them a little. Here many people had brown eyes, and dark hair, but I still had the accent issue. I used to say it was because of me growing up in Africa. Still that didn’t last long. At university I tried to fake the Spanish accent. Which was very hard to achieve, but I did eventually. I faded mine away until I got rid of it. So people would not know where I was from by talking to me. I ended up letting my hair grow my natural colour. One day I was trying to flirt with a guy in a bar, and he said to me how beautiful my green eyes were. It made me feel so fake I decided to go natural. Bye bye contacts.

This doesn’t mean I was OK, because I have always dragged with me that feeling of never being good enough. I was too hairy, so I tried shaving arms, legs and in between, it was worse than before, painful, annoying and useless. It all grew back as before and I had to start again and again, and still no better success with men. I was too short, so I decided to go to the gym, you know to become a hunk, I looked like a dwarf. Besides I never could get those huge arms and flat stomach. I went into pilates. That did work. Still I had people saying I should do more muscles, or cut my hair differently, or grow a beard, or shave it, that I was too dark skinned, they asked me if I was a gypsy or Iranian, some still do. The other day one of the guys I know from when I first came here was calling me the African… Anyway it was never enough, I was never good enough. I thought Spanish were too racists for me, so when I moved to France I hoped it would be different. Epic fail.

I had forgotten how my childhood was, I thought being in my thirties was going to make things easier for me. It didn’t. So yes, some people found me exotic and were interested in me, but many others found me too southern for their taste. Even to be friends. For a hook up maybe, you know, but for more… No. They were ashamed to be seen with me. Again the body hair, facial hair, long hair, not enough muscles and not tall enough. There was always some lame excuse. I came to a point where I have heard it all before. Nothing new. I was that teenager again and it was not pleasant at all. The ugly duckling was back. It hurt, and I didn’t know how to please them anymore and to make them love me. I went into therapy.

We talked about what was bothering me, about my childhood, my relationships, my family. I thought about all that happened to me when I grew up, to why I was feeling like that and why I needed to be so different. I started to understand that some people with good intentions made me this way, and created the path for others to hurt me. I thought about how impossible it had always been to please everyone and how there would always be something to complain about, how it would never be enough. I learned how tiring my life would be if I kept like that. So instead of deciding to change once again, I made up my mind about what I wanted, and I accepted myself how flawed I was.

I know I should say I am perfect the way I am, but that would be false, because no one is perfect. I have lots of flaws and issues, but they make me who I am. All these things make me special and different, and different is good. We are currently living crisis after crisis, or like they call it on twitter, historical events, that make us feel out of place most of the time. When we try to find some kind of normality we get whacked by some kind of injustice, or pain or horror. The world has changed, a lot, but we must not forget the past in order to prevent it from happening again. We don’t want to go back to how bad it was.

March 2022.