By Veronica Wells ·Updated December 13, 2021
When Shoniqua Shandai was a young girl, her favorite movies were The Little Mermaid and What’s Love Got To Do With It? The two films are certainly on the opposite side of the spectrum. But for a little Black girl yearning to see herself represented on screen, Shandai had to take what she could get.
Angela Bassett as Tina Turner gave the future actress a powerful, fierce and fashionable portrayal of a brown-skinned woman even in the midst of her struggles. Watching her on screen, Shandai recalled saying to herself, “I want to do that. I want to be that woman.”
Bolstered by a multi-talented grandmother and a nurturing mother, Shandai, a Virginia native who stars as Angie in the new Prime Video series Harlem, eventually got there. But it was a journey. One that called for her to love herself first.
The daughter of an absentee father, as a young girl Shandai felt that there was something about her that innately made her unlovable. Sadly, that belief was affirmed in the way she was treated outside of her home.
“Being a dark-skinned curvy woman with gapped teeth–-kids are hard,” Shandai told ESSENCE. “It’s tough.” Growing up in an environment where adults are battling their own issues, it’s easy for children to become targets, she explained.
“When you’re struggling, you don’t have the emotional intelligence or patience to speak to your child a certain way. If [kids are] getting it rough at home, they’re going to give it rough. They’re going to get it out. I felt like for a lot of my childhood, I was the board for people to throw it at. I became the source for a lot of children’s rage.”
Shandai was that board from elementary school until her sophomore year of high school when she finally had enough. “I spent my whole freshman year trying to disappear. I wore hats, I wore sweatpants,” Shandai said. “I thought, ‘If I can disappear, they won’t talk about me.’ And I still got talked about. That was the time I started forming the idea that I gotta love me regardless. It was my sophomore year and I said, ‘You know what, I’m just gon’ shine.’”
Shandai cited the emergence of “that daggone curvy women dress down. Our culture is so limitless, why would we be cast out of fashion? They’re taking from our neighborhoods anyway.”
Harlem, on the other hand, seeks to project a different, more realistic and inclusive image.
“Finally, to see ourselves represented in a way that allows us to be the main character, the ingénue, when they’ve made us so marginalized,” Shandai said. “I’m just so grateful for Angie and Tracy.”
TOPICS: harlem
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