LAST weekend, while attending a wedding, I overheard a conversation between a group of people about shades of blackness. The conversation was another painful reminder of the shortcomings of decades of struggle to recognise beauty in the black aesthetic. A young woman remarked to her friend, saying: “Boy, you get black dread.”
She was so astounded by the sight of her friend’s blackness that she remarked at least three or four times about it, and sought an explanation for his apparently unsightly condition. “You working outside now ehy?” she asked, to which the young man uncomfortably answered “no.” Many black people would find my experience at the wedding not so extraordinary, as the exchange I witnessed is commonplace in the black community.
Just last month I returned from a summer camp on Acklins with a group of young Bahamians and on arrival I witnessed a similar exchange with the camp participants and their friends in the community. “You get black like Haitian,” said a young boy in a jeering manner. He had a large grin on his face with a heaving laugh to match, as he offered up his loaded insult. “You better get dat cake soap,” he said, referring to a popular skin bleaching soap.
Yet again, just last Thursday, I was stuck in traffic, moving slowly down Bernard Road when I overheard a group of school children sitting on a wall. As a young boy walked past the group, one of the girls said: “I knew I smelled Haitian. Y’all smell that?” What followed was group laughter.
I could go on and on with countless examples from my daily life demonstrating the established view of blackness as ugly and inferior. My mother notoriously tells the story of my great-grandmother, Miss Lilian (Ibaye baye tonu), who would routinely tell my mother with all of the love in her heart, “you black and ugly just like your father.”
In this 21st century, where black is supposedly beautiful, it is politically incorrect to assert such a contrary claim as an established worldview, but experience trumps politeness. The reality of the world in which we live today is that black people, particularly black women, are constantly confronted by notions of
their inherent inferiority when it comes to standards of beauty.
The abundance of women wearing locked hairstyles does not change the fact. Many of these styles are artificially created with hair extensions, and they are only accepted if they are neatly groomed based on Eurocentric views of hair decorum. Some women with locked hairstyles are the first to turn up their noses at Rastafari with naturally formed dreadlocks, even though it was the struggle of Rastafari that enabled the now popular hairstyle to be mainstreamed.
After several months, many of these women are on to the next hairstyle. Their embrace of the locked style is more about a hair trend and less about a consciousness that embraces natural black beauty.
The success stories of women like Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, or Beyoncé do not change the fact. These women are celebrated for their beauty because they conform to Eurocentric notions of beauty. Beyoncé, spokesmodel for L’Oreal Paris, is famously plagued by the criticism that her skin was allegedly lightened for L’Oreal commercials.
When Tyra Banks made it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated in the 1990s it was heralded as a major accomplishment for black women, but any success worth speaking of can only be seen as marginal, after all the objectified image of Tyra reflects little of her natural black beauty.
When it comes to the overall struggle to establish a benchmark that recognises non-European physical features as beautiful, we have a long way to go. No offence to super models and celebrities, but the most important battle front is not the catwalk or magazine covers. It is within the psyche of little black girls who see themselves as inherently inferior. They dream of marrying into a lighter hue, to be blessed with a prized offspring of white-ish tone. They reach readily
for bleaching creams and hair straighteners, with any number of reasons to justify how they exercise their right to choose. When they get older, their views become more entrenched, so to do their delusions.
At its core is this reality: the acclaimed success of the “Black is Beautiful” cultural movement of the 1960s and ’70s is premature. Black people falsely believe the movement succeeded in cementing a consciousness that black is beautiful when, to the contrary, it did not. By the 1980s, based on my unscientific estimates, interests external to the black community had hijacked the concept of black is beautiful.
For one, the movement was commercialised by powerful corporate interests that capitalised on the marketing opportunities presented by black culture. Afros, for example, became trendy styles for black and white people alike.
When commercial interests penetrated the movement that represented a death blow to the movement, because these interests had the power to steer people on to the next trend. With natural hair, for example, relegated to the realm of fashion fad, its impact could only be superficial. Happening also was a shift in understanding of black beauty. In its original incarnation, the movement was intended to celebrate African culture and to “dispel the notion in many world cultures that black people’s natural features such as skin colour, facial features and hair are inherently ugly.” The concept of natural black beauty was critical to the movement’s purpose, not just black skin.
Furthermore, the movement was inextricably tied to the Black Power political movement, which emphasized “racial pride and the creation of black political and cultural institutions to nurture and promote black collective interests, advance black values, and secure black autonomy.”
It is clear that black people today have by and large abandoned the decolonising mission of establishing a view of natural black as beautiful. Having been pacified by political and economic achievements, in many instances, they have settled for a Eurocentric view of blackness and opted for a laissez-faire view of beauty on the whole. Natural black beauty has been marginalised, exoticised and become exceptional.
One generation ago, the average photograph of a black person in the 1960s and 70s would undoubtedly show a person with natural black hair, styled most likely in an Afro. Prior to the movement, most black women permed their hair with chemicals or straightened it with a pressing comb, but the Black is Beautiful movement changed all of that.
While the generation of parents in that era saw the cultural change to natural hair not in the light of a movement for empowerment, but as an act of rebellion on the part of the youth, the movement’s message was so potent it could not be stopped. As a result of the movement, the embrace of an African cultural aesthetic seemed as though it would be cemented into the consciousness of black people. But an examination of the world today clearly shows it did not.
The multi-million dollar international market for black hair products, controlled mostly by Korean business people, is further proof of this. The so-called black hair industry is not a celebration of natural black beauty. It caters to a large community of black people who have adopted wholesale the Eurocentric standard of black beauty.
The issue of black beauty is a very touchy subject, especially for black women. Most black women with chemically permed hair, for example, would vehemently reject any suggestion that their hair style means they do not love their natural back beauty.
They would probably assert themselves as strong, independent black women, secure in their identity. It is a big fat lie, but an accepted one nonetheless. It cuts to the core of a black woman’s sense of self and to accept such a notion would disrupt one’s entire identity. But if any black woman is honest with herself, she could trace back to a time as a child when the notion of her natural beauty was formed.
Almost every black woman at some point in time was initiated into the school of “hair was too tough; too hard to comb; too much hassle; too wild; too nappy.”
The seeds planted from infancy bear the fruits of adulthood, and no matter how we rationalise our behaviour as adults, the roots remain the same.
After all is said and done, black people must be honest in recognising that the black is beautiful vision is still incomplete. As black people we have come far, but we still have a far, far, far way to go to liberate our own self image.
Pan-African writer and cultural critic Khalila Nicolls is currently a practicing journalist in The Bahamas.