my scars make me beautiful: the unrealistic expectations placed upon black women’s bodies

By Arielle Gray, AFROPUNK contributor

I was 17 when I first went under the knife. I was 18 when I went under again.

Breast reduction surgery had relentlessly been on my mind since I hit puberty. Before the 4th grade, I lived a fairly androgynous life, a life not usually afforded to little black girls. I liked being able to transcend gender lines so easily, to not be so easily defined by societal categories.

I began developing early. By 8, I had already experienced my first period. By the 5th grade, I had DD’s. I hated my chest and they quickly grew into testaments of shame for me. As a young black girl, I was already judged by those around me on implicit racial and gender biases. Though it’s no news to us, recent studies have proven that black girls are viewed as less “innocent” and more “sexually active” than their white counterparts.

I had assumed a “fast ass” girl in middle and high school because of my breast size. I was constantly told to change in school, even though I obeyed dress code. I started to wear extremely baggy clothing and shirts. My high school nurse questioned me when I told her I was a virgin and didn’t need to undergo STD testing. “You sure?” she asked, eyes almost moving down to my chest. “I’m sure,” I answered, folding my arms to hide my from her scrutiny.

The most disturbing trend of developing early was how often and aggressively grown men would approach me, eyes glued to my chest. My lack of self-confidence compounded on top of all of the staring, the assumptions and the rumors coalesced into a deep sense of self loathing that I battled until my teenage years.

Photo of Arielle Gray

My hyper awareness of my womanhood contributed heavily to my depression in high school. It affected my life down to the minute details that only high school girl would be worried about. I could never go shopping with my friends because everything was way too small. Cute bras never fit. I remember going into the store to get measured for a bra when I was 16., “H cup,” the attendant announced after unfurling her measuring tape and handing me a bra that looked like a boat sail. H cup? I didn’t even know that H cups existed.

Chronic back pain and documented impacts on my mental health led to my insurance finally approving to cover a breast reduction for me. We scheduled it for the summer of 2008, in between my junior and senior year. The surgery was relatively uneventful and I healed pretty quickly. I noticed some of the scars but I was too enamored with my new silhouette to really care. I had gone down almost 4 cup sizes and my confidence levels had done a complete 180. The staring and rumors slowed down. Some of the inappropriate leers from grown men stopped though the harassment continued mostly uninterrupted as it had before. Most people assumed I lost an insane amount of weight during the summer. I finally felt like I had regained control of my body image after having it wrested away from me at such an early age.

Things seemed to be going well until I realized that I had to go under the knife again to correct complications from the first surgery. When the bandages unwound from my torso the second time, I quickly learned that all of the confidence that I had gained was only temporary. All of it flew out the window once I saw how much scarring there was this time around.

What is a scar?

“ A scar is the body’s natural way of healing and replacing lost or damaged skin. A scar is usually composed of fibrous tissue. Scars may be formed for many different reasons…

They do tell you before you go under the knife that scarring can almost always be expected, especially after a major surgery. What they don’t tell you is that surgery or not, almost everyone will develop scarring at some point in their lifetime. Nearly “100 million people develop scars each year in the USA”, a number that has increased exponentially in the years since the study was published. The extent of the scarring however, can have varying negative effects on “self esteem” and “body image”.

We don’t live in a scar friendly society nor do we live in a society that applauds surgical changes to your appearance. We exist in an insanely toxic, paradoxical culture when it comes to beauty standards. We’re encouraged as much as possible to try to erase our blemishes and to correct our imperfections. Studies done in the mid 2000s found that “visible scarring had a… significant correlation with perceived stigmatization”. People stare at visible scars and if they’re not staring, they’re wondering how and where the scarring came from.

As soon as I saw the scarring sustained during the second surgery, I began a strict regimen of eating more protein and lathering the scars in Vitamin E and sometimes even bleaching creams. When that stopped working, I quickly became adept at hiding them, even from the closet people in my life. Almost a decade passed and still nothing improved when it came to how I felt about my scarring or my self esteem.

In 2015, actress Ariel Winter from Modern Family underwent breast reduction surgery and last year at the SAG awards, wore a dress that didn’t hide her scars. She was unabashedly proud and the fact that it made people so uncomfortable that she was proud of them. The same year, while attending Afropunk, I saw Breast Cancer survivor Ericka Hart topless at the festival, proudly bearing her double mastectomy scars. Her fearlessness and transformative boldness really made me think long and hard on why I felt the way I did about my own scarring.

We all have scars that we bear, both internal and external. But why are our scars never celebrated in the scope of our humanity? Why are bodily scars so rarely seen or represented in our culture, specifically when it comes to our beauty standards? And why do our body standards always gear to the bodily able? Going deeper than scarring, we almost never see women from the Disabled community represented as love interests or main characters in our culture. Why must our bodies be unmarred in order to be admired?

Deconstructing your own illusions about body image is hard and grueling work, work that will probably continue your entire life. We will always internalize external expectations of how we should act, look or perform. It’s up to us to clear out the baggage to make room to find home in our bodies, as they are. We need to normalize the representation of all body types and furthermore, we need to normalize all body types in positive representations of love, fulfillment and purpose. Deconstructing your own issues with body image allow you to also face the harmful ideas or expectations you yourself hold for others.

Appreciating my own unique beauty and worth allows me to appreciate everyone’s beauty and unique purpose. I am thankful for these scars, simply because they are a part of me. And everyday, I am thankful that my body is mine because for a long time, I didn’t want it.

But I do now. And that’s all that matters.

*Arielle Gray is a Boston based writer, music journalist & artist. You can catch her stalking live shows or eating Ethiopian on Mass Ave. Follow her on Twitter at @bonitafrobum.