“When writing this memoir, I realized the impact this experience had on my vision of beauty,” she says. “And my self-acceptance of being a beautiful, brown-skinned little girl growing up in Iowa. I thought I was beautiful because my mother said so and my family said so, but the world told me different.” It allows for that sitting. “So let’s be now Face to Estée LauderIt’s ironic, because I didn’t feel beautiful until black Hollywood said I was beautiful.
The fact that an entire generation of black women found a reflection of black beauty in Nia Long while Long herself was still waiting to see it tells us something about how beauty standards work, and how much work goes into transforming them. The good 90s, after all, didn’t come out of nowhere. It was Black Hollywood’s corrective response to a century of the larger industry that had made black women invisible, or worse, made us visible in ways that were completely beyond our control. Long’s most famous characters—and indeed Long herself—reflected a new idea of beauty, for the pioneering black woman, expansive in some ways and still restrictive in others. Now, nearly 30 years later, Long embodies a new facet of being a Black woman in Hollywood.
The phrase “don’t break it black” is constantly hurled at black women, ostensibly as a compliment, but sometimes it erases the real pressure that comes with aging — especially aging on a public stage, especially when people have a certain image of you stored in amber.
But Long is not interested in pretending that the body is not something that transforms. “I’m 55. Hormonal things are starting to happen. Your body is shifting and changing. It’s a whole new body.” She’s not sad about this. She also ate the truffle parmesan fries and didn’t seem conflicted about them. Remember the upcoming press tour for Michael, How she wants to be in beautiful dresses but also wants French fries.
