Reclaiming UGLY! by Vanessa Rochelle Lewis

Author:Vanessa Rochelle Lewis [Rochelle Lewis, Vanessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623175870
Publisher: North Atlantic Books

Uglification Unjustly Puts the Onus of Healing on the Individual

While the first UGLY Conference was an intimate, day-long convening of dialogue, healing, and connection, putting it on was no easy feat. It brought up all my nerve-wracking insecurities and forced me to confront some serious trauma. Namely, I still felt lingering shame about how much my own experiences with childhood bullying still took up space in my consciousness. I hadn’t yet divorced from the idea that I was bullied so consistently because I was ugly and unappealing to look at. I also was ashamed by how much I still suffered emotionally when thinking about childhood bullying.

I was afraid that by talking with others about those experiences, or ugliness in general, I would portray myself and other survivors of intense uglification, lookism, and bullying as people who haven’t figured out how to heal. I didn’t want people to think I have a victim complex, I wanted (and still want) to be read as powerful and confident. Today I realize that my fear of and concern about how others perceive me, and my quietness in the face of that fear, are critical to the insidious and covert way that uglification works.

Uglification puts the onus of healing and survival on those of us who’ve experienced the harm, while pressuring us to act like we are imperviousness to the abuse, injustice, and pain we have experienced. We are encouraged to be strong, to compassionately intellectualize why people are cruel, and to move past the impacts of that hurt while lifting ourselves up. We do this all even though we have learned to give up hope and expectation that perpetrators of uglification will change their behaviors, or that community members, school boards, and policy/law makers creating cultural and structural shifts will systemically facilitate those changes.

As a bullied or formerly bullied person, how many times have you heard “that’s just the way things are, get over it” from a loved one, instead of them collaborating with you to find solutions for how to make it better, or them simply affirming the fact that you deserve better protection and better treatment? What about “you need to heal and move on with your life” without anyone actually supporting you through the process of healing in tangible and hands-on ways? Then there is my favorite, “ignore them, they are just jealous of you,” in which a person subliminally asks you to prioritize compassion for the people who hurt you by imagining yourself as being better than them for not being jealous and having something they don’t have. These folks are suggesting that you respond to uglification with further uglification, not offering you protection and healing from uglification.

When I was a bullied child, I rarely experienced my teachers or school counselors talking to my classmates about the bullying I was experiencing. Instead, I—a Black girl child in a world where Black children are frequently groomed for incarceration via the school-to-prison pipeline—was told to stand up for myself, to start fighting back, to stop being so sensitive, to not be such a crybaby.

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