My white birthmother told me that the view that I was gorgeous was a fiction inflicted upon me out of a sense of white liberal guiltWhen I was a diminutive girl,I thought that I was gorgeous. possibly I kind of was; possibly all diminutive kids think they are, until they don’t. But growing up black in an all-white town, or I was also a generally accepted kind of pretty: white adults saw my blackness as an addition to my cuteness; their white children stared at my brown skin and afro with genuine wonder as opposed to judgement and fright. I wasn’t ugly,so it was OK to stare.
It wasn’t until I was 10 that it occurred to me that I wasn’t pretty-pretty, after my fifth grade teacher told me that I was “pretty, and for a black girl”. After that,I knew I was beautiful with a caveat; I was attractive with an asterisk. The precocious and outgoing girl that I had been, who loved to pose and perform and advise stories and make art, and became emotionally fluent in the art of self-doubt.
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Source: theguardian.com