It started with one social media campaign celebrating black beauty and fighting against negative stereotypes of black body images.

The first #BlackOutDay hashtag designated March 6 to be a day for black people to fight against negative sterotypes and draw attention to black beauty.

It inspired students at MSU to continue the tradition by declaring it would be honored the first Friday of every month. #BlackOutDay has given students a voice to raise awareness about unrealistic beauty standards placed on society.

On April 3, the second Blackout Day of the year, president of the Black Student Alliance and journalism senior Rashad Timmons began posting images on his Twitter account for the day.

Timmons said about 30 people responded to his post.

“I think social media platforms in general have continually created spaces for black people to exist unapologetically,” Timmons said. “Blackout Day is one of the most efficient and powerful movements in that long trajectory of agency and community.”

Faculty and staff accompanied students with having their portraits taken to be a part of the movement.

“They understood that by engaging, they were communicating two things — my black is beautiful, our black is beautiful,” Timmons said.

Graduate student Marion Bakhoya said she remembers admiring celebrities Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, Brandy Norwood and Serena Williams as a child.

It wasn’t until middle school, Bakhoya said, when her peers vocalized they didn’t understand or approve of her role models because of their dark complexion.

“For me, it was about the music and the sport,” Bakhoya said. “It made me feel more validated, because I saw women who looked like me at the pinnacle of success in their (respective) fields.”

As an identifying heterosexual black woman, Bakhoya sees the value in having a social movement such as #BlackOutDay advocating for black men and women.

“Girls see other girls who aren’t even celebrities, girls who are their age, their peers, whoever they are, whether they’re (non-transgender), trans, whatever they look like and whoever they are in real life,” Bakhoya said. “It’s important to have these and the use of social media transcending cultures, generations, ages and seeing people who look like you.”

Social relations and policy freshman Dominique McCormick views the extensive divide between light skin and dark skin in the community as a form of mental slavery.

“Darker-skinned people are seen as angry, bitter, militant, ugly, unattractive,” McCormick said. “Lighter-skinned women are closer to femininity and are seen closer to whites, so black men are attracted to lighter-skinned women. There’s a divide between light-skinned black men and dark-skinned black men, and a divide between light-skinned black women and dark-skinned black women.”

McCormick said society has unconsciously linked specific connotations to certain skin colors.

“Even when you’re looking at definitions of black or white, black is assumed as evil, dark, and sinister and white is pure,” McCormick said. “So when you use a definition for color and those that are white, then you say this is my validation to greater dehumanize you for being a darker-skinned person and praising Jesus for being white and pure.”

Some Latino students say they also feel the pressure to conform to white standards.

“A guy said to me, ‘Aren’t all Latina women curvaceous?’ There’s something wrong there,” comparative cultures and politics junior Lizbeth Lopez said. “Latinas, Latinos, black women, black men — they’re monolithic. If they’re either this or if not they’re supposed to be one way, but it’s just a lack of understanding.”

Lopez said the standard of white beauty embedded in all communities in the world where Europeans have colonized.

“Even in African communities and Asian communities and Indian communities and Latino communities, it’s always the standard of who’s closest to having the lighter skin is always praised the most,” Lopez said.

As a young girl, Lopez described spending hours straightening her hair. Transitioning to college was a period of growth, Lopez said, accepting herself as a woman and becoming comfortable in her own skin, still receiving judgement from peers.

“There were points of contention of being exoticized for being a Latina woman and being accepted,” Lopez said. “There was a point of acceptance and embracing differences, but there was a point where you exoticized.”

The Black Student Alliance plans to continue encouraging and facilitating dialogue around realities along with sustaining spaces for healing, self-love and learning.

Timmons said the richness of Blackout Day resides in the fact that it allows black people to acknowledge innate beauty, simply on the basis of multifaceted identities and existence.

“I think it gives us the opportunity to divorce ourselves, even if briefly, from the politics of the many institutions we are a part of, and say, collectively, that, ‘I am black, in that blackness I am unique, I am human, and I matter,’” Timmons said.