Lil’ Kim: A Selfie of Self-Hatred

This week Rapper Lil’ Kim posted up some selfies of herself on Instagram. And The once beautiful bubblin’ brown sista used plastic surgery to turn herself into a glorified White woman with bleached skin, blonde hair weaved in her head, and a nose cut down to appear like a White woman’s.

Damn. Just Damn.

But this isn’t the only case of a Black woman trying to change herself into a glorified White woman. Recent images of actress Persia White show her with a head full of blonde hair. 

And actress Lark Vorhees posted pictures of herself a few months ago with bleached her skin and blonde hair in her head. If anything, Lil’ Kim is just a part of a disturbing trend among Black women.

Lil’ Kim says she used plastic surgery to change herself into this abomination because men like her father and Simps the late rapper Notorious B.I.G said she wasn’t attractive.

I don’t know I thought she was kind of hot back in the day. Not my type, but still hot. When I saw her on the cover of the Hard Core album back in 1997 when I was working at Food Emporium I turned my head. I’ll admit I’d give a woman that looked like Kim a second look if she passed me by on the street.

Now the media wants to make it look like Black men made Lil’ Kim feel so bad she wanted to change herself into this abomination. However, this trend of Black women turning themselves into Glorified White women has nothing to do with Black men and has never had anything to do with Black men.

It has to do with the low self-esteem that these Black women have about themselves.

The truth is most Black women don’t like being Black women. And the reason why they don’ like being Black women has nothing to do with Black men.

No, that has to do with White Supremacy and the culture they’ve been taught about beauty from the day they’re born.

Most Black people deify White men and women. And they see them as the ideal standard of beauty in the world. And in an effort to get closer to the White people they see as God they’ll desecrate their own image.  This is why a Black woman will sew blonde hair in her head, bleach her skin, and perform surgery on herself to remake herself into the image of the being she believes is God: The White Man.

Only the White man she seeks the approval of isn’t a real person. He’s in her head. An imaginary being who she thinks will love her and make her feel loved. Someone who will approve of her. Someone who will truly care for her and tell her she’s special.

Unfortunately, Lil’ Kim was too busy hearing the imagined voices of her father and the late Biggie Smalls in her head. And because she couldn’t shut them out she sought to change herself to please the imaginary people in her head who told her she wasn’t good enough. Lacking the self-esteem and self-worth to find real people who would value her for who she was, she began chasing an imaginary standard of beauty created by Madison Avenue advertisers and Hollywood movie studios that is based on ideals, but not rooted in reality. 

What most Black women never come to understand is that not even real White women look like the White women we see in those magazine covers. To create those imaginary images, those models and actresses paint their faces with a gallon of makeup, hair extensions, and clothes that are pinned in place to fit just right. Then when all that is finished, they use Photoshop to clean up the flaws and make everything appear “perfect”

No woman of any race, creed or color will ever look like those idealized image of White women in the media. Because they were never real in the first place.

Lil’l Kim will never understand that it was Black men who were elevating the image of Black women like Li’l Kim. It was brothers who were buying her albums and buying magazines with her in it. They were the one establishing her as the standard of beauty in the Black community.

Only she and many other sistas couldn’t hear them telling her she was pretty enough.

What Black women like Lil’ Kim don’t know is that Black men like myself don’t want White women. We’ve never wanted White women. If anything we tried to love Black women. We think Black women are beautiful. And we try to tell her and show her how beautiful we think she is. Unfortunately, because Black women don’t love themselves they oftentimes are incapable of hearing the voices of those who value and appreciate them for who they are. Sistas are so focused on the color of their skin that they can’t connect with those who appreciate them for the content of their character.