Joie Whitmon - Attending Honors Program Events - Beyond the Marigolds (3 pts) – Class of 2027

Growing up, most of the comments I heard about my looks came from distant family members. They'd point out how light my skin was, how loose my curls were, or how long my hair got when I straightened it, and then they'd tell me how pretty I was. Both of my parents are darker than me, so at home my complexion just wasn't something we talked about. I never thought of myself as lighter, and definitely not as better because of it, until relatives started bringing it up. As I got older, celebrities and Instagram pushed the same ideas.

I thought about all of that during Beyond the Marigolds: Beauty, Belonging, and Black Girlhood, an Honors discussion on October 12 in Giles 109 led by co-social chairs Christina Simone Coker and Kennedy Chow. One of the first questions they asked was who taught us what beauty looks like, and when we first noticed that certain features counted as beautiful. The discussion used Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye to look at how Eurocentric beauty standards affect Black girls and whether much has changed by 2026.

Pecola wants blue eyes because she's come to believe they would make people love her. The facilitators called this racialized psychological violence, and they connected it to the doll test, where young Black children picked white dolls as the nicer, prettier ones. The idea from the talk I keep coming back to is how beauty gets tied to belonging, and belonging gets tied to worth. If you believe looking a certain way will get you accepted, you'll keep changing yourself to get there. We also talked about how social media changed who sets the standard. It used to mostly be celebrities in magazines and on TV. Now regular people on TikTok and Instagram set it too, so a lot of the pressure comes from people we actually know or have commonalities with.

The part that challenged me most was when we started talking about Spelman. Around homecoming and other big events, you see a lot more sew-ins, quick weaves, and straight styles on campus. Someone brought up Taylor Mills, who wore her natural hair out all the time as Miss Spelman last year and kept getting asked about her hair more than her platform. Then one of my honors peers mentioned that we have a unique chance to be surrounded by Black women every day, almost a sacred space, and we still aren't taking full advantage of it here at Spelman College. Even on campus, a lot of us are still following Western and capitalistic beauty standards.

That hit close to home because I got a sew-in for homecoming. I didn't think about the money or why I wanted it so badly. I just felt like I needed it. I don't think getting a sew-in is wrong, and nobody at the event was judging anyone's hair. But I realized I had never asked myself where that feeling came from. I'd been treating one specific kind of polished look as something I owed people, even at a school that's supposed to celebrate women who look like me.

This connects to intellectual sovereignty, the Honors habit of mind of thinking for myself, because the discussion pushed me to question something I'd accepted without thinking about it. It also made me think about what I owe the Spelman community. If this is going to be a place where Black women decide for ourselves what's beautiful, we have to actually do that, including in how we compliment and react to each other. I'm a senior, and I'll be going into the corporate world soon. I want to get more comfortable showing up as myself now. I don't need to look completely put together every time I leave my room, and I don't have to fit Western beauty standards to deserve respect. If I can get comfortable doing that here, it'll be easier to keep doing it at work.

At the end of The Bluest Eye, Claudia says the marigolds didn't grow that year because the soil was bad for them. I think Spelman could be better soil than most places, but that's up to us.

By Joie Whitmon